< 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. >
Ok, "will" is the means to penetrate noise and distraction, to not experience additional unwanted entanglement with the environment. < 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.> How can the internal structure of the string matter but not be revealing about the source, or vice versa? The string has auto-mutual information or not? If there are infinitely many potential generating functions, and there is no way to ascertain the probability of which one is mostly likely so far, then it seems any character is equally likely? I claim in the free will case that all generating functions are not as likely. Marcus - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . 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/
