Interesting Links for 17-01-2014

[andrewducker]

• What's expected of us (a neat short story on determinism)
  (tags: short_story scifi determinism FreeWill timetravel )
• The Independent seeks a buyer
  (tags: news media uk )
• Meet the Man Google Hired to Make AI a Reality
  (tags: google ai )
• Dutch scheme aims to reintegrate alcoholics by giving them beer
  (tags: alcohol netherlands )
• I'm fairly sure that

Comments

What's expected of us (a neat short story on determinism)

[cartesiandaemon]

Oh wow, I didn't know Chiang had written anything new. His short stories are amazing.

Partly I'm annoyed that people are still arguing about free-will vs determinism. I feel like we know the answer, even if we disagree about whether to call that "free-will" or not.

But admittedly, that's easy if we don't have any *way* of knowing the future. We still don't know what it would be like knowing something we might do is predestined and trying to wrestle with it.

One answer is things like "given a perfect short-term-memory-impairing drug and run through http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomb's_paradox several times". That's theoretically physically possible right now, so it would be strange to experience, but there's no mystery about what would happen.

Another answer is from a physics perspective. The universe is, basically, according to QM or GR, a complicated differential equation run on a surface. If that surface has loops in, you have loops in causality. But I don't know what would happen if what you got going round the loop "conflicted" with what was before.

I can only guess it would be like, the particular state of a differential equation is determined by the boundary conditions -- typically the initial conditions. But in this case, the only "valid" universes are those which don't conflict.

I don't know how that translates into human experience. My best interpretation is that it works like predestination in greek myths: if something is "predestined" then it happens for some reason, even if a weird reason you didn't expect...?

[simont]

The Predictor story: I remember seeing that some years ago, because I recognised the allusion to it in Ken Macleod's The Night Sessions. However, I'd assumed it was written by Macleod and he was referring to his own previous work, so I'm now startled to find it's by someone else!

Re: What's expected of us (a neat short story on determinism)

[andrewducker]

The story is from 2005...

And if you like Chiang then you should really read some Greg Egan.

I particularly recommend the short story collection "Axiomatic" and the novel Permutation City.

Re: What's expected of us (a neat short story on determinism)

[cartesiandaemon]

Huh. Apparently it just didn't get into his large collection.

And yes, I've read all the Greg Egan I can find. I don't *always* agree with him, but it seems he's almost the only person writing what I could comfortably call "hard science fiction". And once, "hard mathematics", which I hadn't thought would exist :)

Re: What's expected of us (a neat short story on determinism)

[apostle_of_eris]

Asimov's original "thiotimoline" was in 1948.

Re: What's expected of us (a neat short story on determinism)

[andrewducker]

Oooh. I don't think I've read that in over a decade! Excellent short story, and I loved his introduction to it (or possibly postscript) where he talked about it coming up on his viva.