Discussions of *free will and determinism* almost always appear to me as latent discussions about metaphysics. In the thread up to now, there have emerged several different perspectives and so we are confronted by the question of what it is each of us wants from and for such concepts. Each want just as distinct and varied as the perspectives themselves. Pushing against, moving with, and generally sensing for the differences provides an opportunity for production and meaning.
Concepts, like free will or determinism, are sensory organs attuned to problems. From my perspective, many problems are like mountains, to be experienced and not necessarily solved. Lately, for me, *will* designates something about one's unique trajectory through the world, that which continues to differentiate one from another, an affirmation through difference. For others, *will* designates *choice*. Each claim to a concept is an invitation to another's struggle. This week, my struggle is with a problem in data compression, namely, find a function that efficiently computes the Kolmogorov complexity for a given string. In theory, there is for any finite string (possibly the history of our world) a machine (but really a family, germ?) that can efficiently produce it. The problem of writing a general function that finds said program (as you know) is hard. In the theoretical limit, I should *expect* my problem to coincide with Shannon entropy. In practice, the internal structure of the string matters and we settle for performing compression with algorithms whose behavior ought to match the expected theoretical limits. Still, given an arbitrary string generated by an unknown source, I can only hope to guess the next digit. If our problem is one where we ask about the emergence of new kinds, I suspect that determinism is not likely to be a reliable organ. -- Sent from: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
