archibald wrote:... Reverend Pierre de Chardin....

I love his unisex fashions, incorporating geometric designs and bold colours. His couture handbags are particularly eye-catching.

felltoearth wrote:

archibald wrote:felltoearth, read the following chapter (chapter 14, the final one, where all is revealed). Deutsch has in mind that there are super-intelligent people at the end/death of the universe who will resurrect us and put us in heaven, because it's the moral thing to do:
https://www.daftarche.com/attachments/e ... eality.pdf


Warning: be prepared for a LOT of wibble. If you can slog through it, you can see why it attracts woo-heads. Deutsch is essentially riffing on the ideas of the Very Reverend Pierre de Chardin:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega_Point

Thanks to pointing to that. I might have a look but I think I might have better things to do.

No prob. You can see from the paragraph that romansh posted what sort of stuff is in there (mostly as the chapter reaches its, er, climax).

It was your astute noting that absolute/cosmic morality was being brought in by the back door that prompted me to look a bit more closely, since I had not noticed it myself at first. Why John Platko, our resident, um, truth-seeker, thought he could get away with lying about it afterwards is weird, when anyone making a bit of effort could go and read more material, including incidentally a subsequent Deutsch book in which he eventually, towards the end of that book, again tries to apply his speculative ideas to a supposed cosmic morality.

LucidFlight wrote:.... bold colours...

Now now. Don't you start making moral propositions too!

romansh wrote:

John Platko wrote:

Carroll wrote:

On the other hand, if you use a weak sense of free will, along the lines of “a useful theory of macroscopic human behavior models people as rational agents capable of making choices,” then free will is completely compatible with the underlying laws of physics, whether they are deterministic or not. That is the (fairly standard) compatibilist position, as defended by me in Free Will is as Real as Baseball. I would argue that this is the most useful notion of free will, the one people have in mind as they contemplate whether to go right to law school or spend a year hiking through Europe. It is not so weak as to be tautological: we could imagine a universe in which there were simple robust future boundary conditions, such that a model of rational agents would not be sufficient to describe the world. E.g. a world in which there were accurate prophesies of the future: “You will grow up to marry a handsome prince.” (Like it or not.) For better or for worse, that’s not the world we live in. What happens to you in the future is a combination of choices you make and forces well beyond your control — make the best of it!

We can add most useful notions of to worth wanting

It is the freedom of the choices we make that is under discussion. And here Carroll is as much as a determinist as I am. Our choices are determined and in which thread of the multiverse we end up in is not of our own making. Only a matter of of probability.

So yes or no to the OPs question: free will exists? i.e free will is as real as a baseball?

GrahamH wrote:

archibald wrote:felltoearth, read the following chapter (chapter 14, the final one, where all is revealed). Deutsch has in mind that there are super-intelligent people at the end/death of the universe who will resurrect us and put us in heaven, because it's the moral thing to do:
https://www.daftarche.com/attachments/e ... eality.pdf


Warning: be prepared for a LOT of wibble. If you can slog through it, you can see why it attracts woo-heads. Deutsch is essentially riffing on the ideas of the Very Reverend Pierre de Chardin:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega_Point

It seems appropriate that what amounts to dodgy religious Sci-Fi is presented as argument on April Fools Day. L. Ron Hubbard would be impressed.

Do you know much about David Deutsch?

All we need now is the explanation for how a computer program has free will...

No need to settle for an explanation, I have a demonstration of that in the technical design and engineering section of the forum.

archibald wrote:

GrahamH wrote:L. Ron Hubbard would be impressed.

I was thinking that too.

GrahamH wrote:All we need now is the explanation for how a computer program has free will...

I wouldn't hold out in much expectation if I were you. Free will has never been shown to be even possible.

Perhaps Sean Carroll's Free Will Is as Real as Baseball will shed some light on this for you.

archibald wrote:

John Platko wrote:

romansh wrote:Does John create his own nonsense?

Yes, but with a little help from his friends.

Does he do it freely, independently of cause; not on his or anyone else's life?

It's pretty easy to show nonsense for what it is. Not so easy to show that ideas from the likes of David Deutsch or Sean Carroll, i.e. the bulk of the ideas I presented in this thread, are nonsense.

At some point, David Deutsch has gone off on a fantasy.

Here's were you always come up short. You offer an opinion but then fail to support it. The basic ideas around free will that David wrote about in that book back in 1997 are still a part of his view of physical reality. Although now he's had a chance to formalize the gist of those ideas in CT and we're seeing how they have matured into ideas robust enough to be at the core of peer reviewed papers in respectable journals.

As for your ideas, they are nonsense. Most notably the faux-maths/logic used to try to assert that a one-per-person information pattern survives even if only one snippet survives. I'm not going through it again. If you didn't get it, that's your problem.

Again? When did you go through it the first time? I didn't say what you said I said. And my maths are not faux. As for how information patterns can survive on different substrates - it would be folly to try to prove that untrue.

Argument by incredulity fails. You need to show the math. You need to explain why someone is wrong. (which is what I'm doing here, I'm explaining why your argument fails. You haven't shown the flaw in my math - heck you haven't even asked basic obvious questions like: John, how does the operation of sum work on soul snippets.

John Platko wrote:

GrahamH wrote:
All we need now is the explanation for how a computer program has free will...

No need to settle for an explanation, I have a demonstration of that in the technical design and engineering section of the forum.

How is that an example? How is the deterministic functioning of a physical computer mechanism either "will" or "free"?
I don't object to likening it to what real humans probably have, but that comparison only undermines your position. You no more have free will than does your computer. It actually illustrates how free will is (or soon will be) a redundant concept.

Maybe you could work through just where you think the free will is in a system that deterministically follows a sequence of fixed instructions and is entirely contingent in the prior states of the physical system every step of the way.

John Platko wrote::sigh: Perhaps Sean Carroll's Free Will Is as Real as Baseball will shed some light on this for you.

Nope. Compatibilist fudgecrap. Seen that shite a thousand times. It's arguably worse than your soul garbage, which is saying something. And Dennett is arguably a worse wibbler on the topic than David Deutsch is on the topic of cosmic morality, which is also saying something.

John Platko wrote:

archibald wrote:

GrahamH wrote:L. Ron Hubbard would be impressed.

I was thinking that too.

GrahamH wrote:All we need now is the explanation for how a computer program has free will...

I wouldn't hold out in much expectation if I were you. Free will has never been shown to be even possible.

Perhaps Sean Carroll's Free Will Is as Real as Baseball will shed some light on this for you.

This is surely not what you mean by free will, is it? Given all the talk of "spiritual" and "soul snippets" and the idea that they might define the evolution of the multiverse in some vague free-willing way I have take you to have an altogether different concept of free will.

If all you want to say is:

Likewise for free will. We can be perfectly orthodox materialists and yet believe in free will, if what we mean by that is that there is a level of description that is useful in certain contexts and that includes “autonomous agents with free will” as crucial ingredients. That’s the “variety of free will worth having,” as Daniel Dennett would put it.

Then fine, no objection from me. In some narrow contexts it could be a useful description, no more real or fundamental than the fact the people play ballgames. People find it useful to talk of some behaviour under evident coercion differently to other behaviour where the coercion or mechanism is not at all clear. That doesn't get you to be the author of your own bit of multiverse or insert a comforting "purpose" into the world to help you sleep at night.

LucidFlight wrote:

archibald wrote:... Reverend Pierre de Chardin....

I love his unisex fashions, incorporating geometric designs and bold colours. His couture handbags are particularly eye-catching.

He's looking snazzy here.




His fashion is more: "A Globe, Clothing Itself with a Brain" (see link below)

What I love about these discussions is how no matter how random some responses to my comments are, I still learn things from whatever gets dragged in. I knew nothing about the Reverend and his ideas - I came to CT from a much more practical perspective. What an amazing man who influenced the thought process of so many people.

You can learn more about him here. It's all good but I especially enjoyed this.

Artificial life fans take this idea one step further. They see virtual life – Teilhard's tangential energy – trying to break out of organic life into new forms. The founder of artificial life research, Chris Langton, told reporter Steven Levy that "there are these other forms of life, artificial ones, that want to come into existence. And they are using me as a vehicle for reproduction and for implementation."

According to Teilhard, this invisible virtual life has been with us since the beginning.
We now have a vehicle – the Net – that enables us to see virtual life for what it really is. It's not the 0s and the 1s – those are visible. Virtual life is, as Barlow argues, "the space between the 0s and the 1s. It's the pattern of information that is relevant. Invisible life is composed of those life forms emerging in the space between things. Cyberspace helps us see these forms by taking us past the mechanical barrier."

John Platko wrote:So yes or no to the OPs question: free will exists? i.e free will is as real as a baseball?

Lol. You don't even understand the stuff you post. It's not about 'a baseball'.

archibald wrote:

felltoearth wrote:

archibald wrote:felltoearth, read the following chapter (chapter 14, the final one, where all is revealed). Deutsch has in mind that there are super-intelligent people at the end/death of the universe who will resurrect us and put us in heaven, because it's the moral thing to do:
https://www.daftarche.com/attachments/e ... eality.pdf


Warning: be prepared for a LOT of wibble. If you can slog through it, you can see why it attracts woo-heads. Deutsch is essentially riffing on the ideas of the Very Reverend Pierre de Chardin:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega_Point

Thanks to pointing to that. I might have a look but I think I might have better things to do.

No prob. You can see from the paragraph that romansh posted what sort of stuff is in there (mostly as the chapter reaches its, er, climax).

It was your astute noting that absolute/cosmic morality was being brought in by the back door that prompted me to look a bit more closely, since I had not noticed it myself at first. Why John Platko, our resident, um, truth-seeker, thought he could get away with lying about it afterwards is weird, when anyone making a bit of effort could go and read more material, including incidentally a subsequent Deutsch book in which he eventually, towards the end of that book, again tries to apply his speculative ideas to a supposed cosmic morality.

Deutsch made it very clear in the book what he was not proposing to do.

(I am not proposing to define moral or aesthetic values in terms of such representations; I am merely pointing out that thanks to the multiverse character of quantum reality, free will and related concepts are now compatible with physics.

I don't know how he could have been clearer about that.

Cherry-picking as well as obfuscating, eh? Typical theist.

archibald wrote:

John Platko wrote:So yes or no to the OPs question: free will exists? i.e free will is as real as a baseball?

Lol. You don't even understand the stuff you post. It's not about 'a baseball'.

Excuse me but, I get to ask my own questions.

John Platko wrote:

archibald wrote:

John Platko wrote:So yes or no to the OPs question: free will exists? i.e free will is as real as a baseball?

Lol. You don't even understand the stuff you post. It's not about 'a baseball'.

Excuse me but, I get to ask my own questions.

Yeah right. I believe you. Boy are you a sad piece of work.

archibald wrote:

John Platko wrote:So yes or no to the OPs question: free will exists? i.e free will is as real as a baseball?

Lol. You don't even understand the stuff you post. It's not about 'a baseball'.

Good spot. Free will is NOT "real as A baseball".

GrahamH wrote:

archibald wrote:

John Platko wrote:So yes or no to the OPs question: free will exists? i.e free will is as real as a baseball?

Lol. You don't even understand the stuff you post. It's not about 'a baseball'.

Good spot. Free will is NOT "real as A baseball".

Lol. But now our resident, um, truth-seeker, is about to try to pretend to defend it anyway, rather than admit a blooper.

Go for it john. Do me half a page of wibble!

John Platko wrote::sigh: Perhaps Sean Carroll's Free Will Is as Real as Baseball will shed some light on this for you.

'It's a shame you failed to understand Sean Carroll's words.
Free will is real as arse-scratching.

[Edited for spelling]