Thank you, Steve. I’ve been thinking... Do I really choose to have a positive outlook on life?
We’ve discussed free will before, and I’ve shared my thoughts. But recently I came across a few new ideas on the topic, and it got me wondering again. What is free will, anyway? Honestly, I have no clue. What I do know is this: over time, I’ve learned a few things that help me feel better. Not from any grand philosophy, just from reading, listening, watching others—and, well, trial and error. One weird example: cold showers. They make me feel good. Not while I’m in them, obviously—that part’s awful. But afterward, I feel great. And then I do other useful things, like tackling boring tasks I’ve been avoiding. So here's the question: when I take a cold shower, is that my free will at work? Or is it just my inner AI reacting to good reinforcement? And if I do have free will when I choose to suffer under icy water... then does an AI trained to do hard things for rewards also have free will? I’ll let you know once I figure it out. Probably from inside the next cold shower. On Fri, 6 Jun 2025 at 18:06, steve smith <sasm...@swcp.com> wrote: > Pieter - > > Wow, that's quite a dark view of the future with the capitalists > > running the show! > > > > I just want to repeat what I said before — nobody knows the future. > > And we also don’t know what will happen if we try different policies now. > > > > Maybe I am living in a bubble, and maybe I’m totally wrong — but I’m > > honestly glad that my view of the future is still bright. > I will grant you that there is significant upside to being optimistic > and able to appreciate and hope for the future... it is difficult to > manifest something you can't imagine. > > At times I'm the one chided for being optimistic. I think the phrase > was "hope in one hand and sh*t in the other and see which one fills up > first". The image was mildly sobering but it didn't make me any less > fundamentally optimistic in spite of my ability (propensity) to conjure > "worst case scenarios" with my frontal lobes tied behiind my back. It > is probably an addiction, the dopamine channels fueled by cynicism. > > I take this crue here to be intrinsically technoUtopian, to have a bias > and live in confirmation bias around "every problem has a technical > solution". It is what took me into science and then diverted me into > more technological roles... the idea that I could outthink every > problem, preferably with a large crew of like minded folks nominally > working on the same problem and possibly with the economic might of the > US Science and Engineering budget to provide resources. At home I'm a > hopeful tinkerer who pats the device or the garden on the head every > time I have applied a little "common sense" to it and try to "hope" it > into returning to the homeostatic mode it was "designed" to operate > in. This works often enough that I still do it most of the time. I > rarely give up on things and throw them away. I tend to take over other > people's "lost causes" and try to outsmart the gremlins inside of them. > > So my tendency to *piss in the punchbowl* around grand technological > solutions is probably at least half dopamine self-medication to make up > for the *bizarre* self-destructive behaviour of our government and > industry... especially that of the USA, notably throughout *my* lifetime > but acutely more numbskulled in the last 10... > > In closing, I want to acknowledge the value of your positivity and my > own (ab)use of that as a foil to feed my addiction to technoCynicism. > > - Steve > > .- .-.. .-.. / ..-. --- --- - . .-. ... / .- .-. . / .-- .-. --- -. --. / > ... --- -- . / .- .-. . / ..- ... . ..-. ..- .-.. > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe / Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom > https://bit.ly/virtualfriam > to (un)subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com > FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ > archives: 5/2017 thru present > https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/ > 1/2003 thru 6/2021 http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/ >
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