Some of the ongoing discussions in this forum elicit a possible interface with the Turing test (below, entry copied from Wikipedia). Briefly, the person being tested sits behind a screen in which answers to questions are given, posed to (either) a real person OR a very intelligent computer. Judging solely by the content and structure of the replies (and any other linguistic criteria - but not the sound of a voice, which has to be neutral); the querant has to decide if the entity on the other side of the screen is a person or a computer. Now feature an analogous situation in which person A claims to be Enlightened, and person or persons (B, C...) have to decide if A is "really" E'd or not. As hinted at by various contributors to this forum, there are certain stock answers which can be repeated in boiler-plate fashion; so is the decision based on the content of the replies? If B is Enlightened also, are there subtle types of perception which can ascertain the truth more readily? The lesson here is that the Internet is a type of blank screen. People can get lured into almost anything, on the basis of a vivid imagination filling in the blanks. Just last week, a young teenage female got suckered into actually traveling to the Middle East to meet some "guy" she met in a chat room!.. It's quite possible, some of the contributors to this forum are "actuallY' machines (computers) masquerading as humans. As a Turing test, there's no final way to know; since the even after decades since Turing's time (he was a British genius who contributed to breaking the German Code during WWII); nobody has yet (in theory) figured out a truly objective way to distinguish the replies of an intelligent machine from a human. Ultimately, we all could be Matrix entities living in a Matrix world, not knowing it. Now back to the article on Free Will. A key statement by the author of "Free Will -- you only think you have it" is "And they [mathematicians Kochen and conway] admit there's no way for us to tell. "Our lives could be like the second showing of a movie -- all actions play out as thoough they are free, but that freedom is an illusion," says Kochen". So, basically, the notion of a true free will based on an indeterministic level of QM reality (and thus, the whole ball of wax operates in the same mode);; incorporates the key point that "there's no way for us to tell"; ...judging by superficial appearances, if our will is free or not. This could be a provable mathematical corollary to Kochen's and Conway's theorem.. In any event, the fact of our not- knowing is in some ways like our incapacity to not know what's on the other side of that Turing machine. The fact that we can't tell if our will is free or not; leaves the door open for an ironic paradox: we can act AS IF our will is free, even if it isn't, and not be the worse for wear. We can't even tell if our actions are "really" free will or not. This begs the question: Say 't Hooft's theory is true, and we don't have free will; but we are not given that information. Note our actions under that circumstance; and then ask, would our actions differ if 't Hooft's theory is false? Pershaps not, due to the possible corollary of Conways: that there's no way for us to tell.
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