Free Will

[psyllogism]

I basically had this conversation in my head on my way home from work today.

Apologies in advance to the far-more-brilliant-than-me Ryan North and his fantastic Dinosaur Comics series. The webcomic art and concept are entirely his. I just borrowed it for my words:

Comments

[anailia]

That is an excellent way for you to express your complicated thoughts! You should do a regular comic series with KITTENS because while dinosaurs are cool kittens are better.

In any case, I will post my thoughts here and then say them to you since you are 10 feet away right now. Deterministic and chance need to be defined. What do they mean.

[psyllogism]

"Determinism" to me is easy: can the "next step" be computed with a (sufficiently complex) Turing machine?

Randomness is much, much harder to define but must be confronted once one has denied determinism. Randomness can neither be predicted nor computed, nor is it chosen. That's the best I can do.

[anailia]

I fear this conversation is beyond me =( I don't grok what things could or could not be computed by turing machines.

[batzilla]

I agree very strongly with the suggestion about the kittens.

[magus341]

God is the universal utility function. I like that idea. I believe randomness is a function of understanding. To a physicist with enough information, a die roll is not random. To a normal human, it is.

[psyllogism]

I'm not yet convinced that randomness is just lack of information. Under many (most?) interpretations of quantum mechanics, randomness is a fundamental part of the universe. I simple die roll might ultimately be (mostly) non-random, but parts of the universe still might be.