On 16 Oct 2016, at 19:32, John Clark wrote:
Evgenii Rudnyi <use...@rudnyi.ru> wrote:
> I have listened to Sean Carroll's Big Picture.
I read his book too.
> His world view is actually similar to the Game of Life, well,
the rules are a bit more complicated. Below is the link to the
equation that he proposes.
Carroll's equation is ASTRONOMICALLY more complicated than
Conway's rules for the Game of Life; the beauty of Conway's
rules is that although very simple they are Turing complete and
thus can lead to arbitrary magnitudes of complexity.
Yes, like the combinators, or elementary formal arithmetic. Actually,
by the incredible work of Putnam, Davis, Robinson, Matiyasevich, just
one degree four diophantine polynomial is Turing Universal (so that by
assuming Church's thesis, Hilbert's tenth problem is unsolvable).
And Carroll's equation doesn't explain Dark Matter or initial
conditions, such as why Dark Energy has the value it has and isn't
10^120 times stronger, nor does it explain the behavior of neutrinos
or tell us what the conditions are at the center of a Black Hole.
Having said that I do admit that Carroll's equation can predict most
of the things that happen in everyday life, although it would take
one hell of a lot of calculations to do so.
Well, if we assume computationalism, Carroll's equation does not solve
the mind-body problem.
The Turing-complete proposition above does, in the case the
probability one defined from self-reference gives a structure defining
the observable of measure one. As the quantum does that well (Gleason
theorem), we need to get enough close to the quantum to lift it on
arithmetic.
But incompleteness does provide the nuances needed, and they have a
quantum-like enough structure already which confirms
computationalism. Intuitively, we can already grasp that when we
observe ourselves+environment below the computationalist substitution
level, we get infinities of "world/computations" interfering
statistically.
> Carroll claims that his equation describes human beings as
well. He takes a compatibilist position in respect to free will
The one problem I have with Carroll's book is that he talks a lot
about "free will" without giving us even a hint at what that term is
supposed to mean; tell me what it means and I'll tell you if human
beings have that property or not, and I'll tell you if a
roulette wheel or a Cuckoo clock has that property too.
You have yourself propose a definition, and I have proposed some
variety of notion.
Free-will is when someone is self-determined. A kid told me that it is
the ability to eat chocolate even before dinner, being quite
determined on the actions to be enacted.
Despite a Turing machine can solve Carroll-like equation she can't
solve any equation determining in advance its future behavior, but
then she can, with respect to some goal, ponder and choose among
different future actions, and determines its course of action. You
need some amount of free-will (that, will + free) to smoke the first
cigarette, and you need some free-will to smoke the last one.
Adding randomness or non-causal-ness, can only lower free-will.
> No, I do not know what life is. I guess, nobody does.
You know what life is you just don't have a definition, but you
have something much better, examples. After being given a few
examples of things that are alive and things that are not it's easy
to put most new objects in the correct category, although a few
times, such as with viruses, it's a judgement call. Carroll gave us
neither a definition of "free will" nor a set of examples of things
that have it and things that don't, so I have no idea what the term
means.
The animals plants, which might react only instinctively from
immediate measurement might have much less free-will than dogs,
gorilla and humans. I guess you need more than a cerebral stem + a
cerebellum, you need a brain (that is a reasonable limbic system and a
"higher cortex").
Free-will is a double-edged gift. It makes possible for an entity to
hurt another, or even itself.
In moral, free-will is needed to get a notion of personal
responsibility, and guilt is a symptom that we (the high mammifer,
like cats, ..) have it.
All judges use the free-will notion to distinguish the 4 following
cases of a man killing a woman with his car:
1) seemingly because the woman jumped on the road in front of him, and
he could not avoid her,
2) seemingly because he decided to finish all bottles of wine at the
party before leaving it with his car, and then drove like a nut.
3) seemingly because he hated her, as she decided to break with him,
and in rage use his car to kill her "purposefully".
4) seemingly because he is a psychopath and seems to appreciate
killing woman in a way or another, for sexual pleasure.
Most people can guess what a reasonable judge would decide among
"acquitted, jail, hospital and asylum" for those guy.
Free-will might be related also to the dilemma of the prisoner, in
game theory, and perhaps an ability to diagonalize on our own habits.
It might ease adaptation and enrich the relationship (in procedural
abilities).
Free will is not the ability to chose what we will, it is the ability
to choose comma. The word "free" can be kept to make clear that we
assume the entity is not stuck in a hole, or in jail, etc.
Bruno
John K Clark
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