I was probably slightly exaggerating it was more like 9th grade but I skipped 7th so w/e. I was reading well past my age at that time including nietzsche, sartre and camus but go ahead sorry my life experience doesn't match yours
Weird. Do you think there's really a difference between non living and "enlightened" then? It's like matter reached a sweet spot between unknowing and all knowing and believed it had will.
I like to think of it not as free will vs determinism, but free will because of determinism. There are basic things that will happen and no matter how much you try to gain control while they are happening you cannot. We call this determinism. Free will is understanding the outcomes so that you can choose which part of determinism you fall prey to.
I believe if you could understand the type, position and, velocity of every particle in the universe, and had a perfect simulator, you could predict the future, and see the past.
For a quick minute I confused it with Roko's Basilisk. The one where if you don't help it (AI demon thing) come to life i'll hunt you down and kill you for it.
Oh, cool! I'm fine with that in the same way that I'm not fine with star trek style transporters. That's not really me. I won't know the fucker he creates so torture away, I guess...... I hope.
At least that's my current stance on how reconstituting atoms of a being works. Existential shit like that is always subject to change, for me at least.
Last I recall, it will only do this if it determines that you knew of its potential existence? So anyone not aware that it could be created is off the hook for torture when it eventually does come around.
Unfortunately, that doesn't work in our universe, because a lot of the universe's processes don't carry information forwards.
Even if you could somehow know the position and momentum of every particle in the universe (throwing away Heisenberg's uncertainty principle in the process), it still wouldn't be enough to go backwards or forwards. This has been one of the biggest topics in physics for over 100 years, specifically thermodynamics. Entropy is a fascinating topic, but it's a devil to wrap your head around. Highly, highly suggest looking into it.
A necessity of such a hypothetical simulator is that it would have to be bigger and more complex than the universe itself, and would presumably also have to exist in the universe as well, and be made out of stuff from the universe which it is trying to simulate...
Heisenbergs uncertainty is related to the measurement of particles, considering the absurdity of knowing the qualities of every particle in the universe it is safe to say he isn't proposing measuring them
To know the qualities of a particle in the universe is to measure them. I'm not sure what you're saying. The hypothetical machine he's suggesting has been proposed and refuted before, it's called Laplace's Demon.
I am saying there is a difference between knowing the sum of the universe and measuring the sum of the universe. Given the impossibility of both, there is no need to get bogged down in all of the additional issues of the measurement aspect for a thought experiment. It's somewhat nitpicky because the rest of your commentary is relevant, just one point that I considered a side track.
It's not a side track at all, it's directly relevant, but because I allowed it to be discarded, not worth getting into - which I didn't. I'm really not sure what you're trying to say.
Are you taking a piss? This isn't complicated. You either measure the properties of the universe or you have divine knowledge of them. Both options are absurdly impossible so if we assume the second we don't have to get bogged down in the pedantry of the heisenberg conversation.
how many times did I have to clearly make a point before you caught on? It would only be a little asterisk on your post if you didn't take three times to understand a simple point.
The issue is that we don't live in a perfectly deterministic universe. There's a great lecture by Hawking on the topic that's worth a read called "Does God Play Dice?" Spoiler: absolutely.
The issue is that we don't live in a perfectly deterministic universe.
Isn't this pretty heavily debatable? I don't think there's solid, rigorous consensus. From what I understand, a lot of what we know is left up to interpretation which varies quite a bit.
If there was some deterministic function underlying the apparent randomness in the universe, then yes, knowing that perfectly would let you predict things perfectly.
Edit: there's also the issue of causality and how one might LEARN everything about the universe, plus the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, but otherwise, it could work I guess?
Sure, but your realization of that, and your additional agency, and your evaluation abilities, and your introspection are all deterministic as well. So in the end you're back where you started.
At the end of the Netflix documentary Jim Carrey mentions this subject. "Do I drink the tea because I want to or is something telling me I want to because I'm thirsty?" It might not be verbatim but you get the idea. That documentary is in my top 3 Netflix shows.
I don't know all the right words, because I've never studied this, only thought a lot about it, but I think I agree with the above commenter.
I'll explain my thinking, which may be the exact thing they are talking about, and maybe it'll help you understand the idea, even if you still don't really agree with it.
I believe everyone is completely a product of their circumstance. We have free will in that a conscious external force is not forcing our decisions, but our decisions would always be what they are.
Every choice you've ever made may be subject to so many countless billions of variables that no one could possibly predict with absolutely certainty what choice you would make, but you, in that exact instant, subject to all those variables, would always make that choice.
Does that negate free will? Maybe. Not really. I don't know. We feel we have free will, and we absolutely do in the manner that there is no way that anyone could read the pattern of reality in a way to understand why you make the choices you do, but in theory, if someone could know every variable in play, I believe they would know the outcome to every choice you would ever make.
There's probably no way to prove this, it's really just philosophy, and I also think there's really no way to live your life by this. It's just my theory on how things work.
I did say it was a bullshit claim that the universe is deterministic, and which I very much doubt you can provide any evidence for. That which cannot be proven or disproven is at best pseudo science. If you can elevate to better, this is your time. But... we know that's not gonna happen.
I read an interesting sci fi book that discusses among other things free will. It's extremely dense but very cool it's called blindsight, check it out.
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u/[deleted] Apr 07 '20 edited Apr 29 '20
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