Robot free will

[Reply #40 on:]

Yes, but what clothes will I wear tomorrow?

* winna airs out his winna suit.

[Reply #41 on:]

I just wanted to say I really enjoyed this thread about free will. I wish I had actually started talking to y'all when I created the account so many years ago.

But if determinism is true then it was meant to happen that way anyway. Which is my belief. However, I probably would like to believe in compatibilism more though. Yet, the definition of free will is grossly understated.  Free will is supposed to mean us making a choice without outside influence....but what in this world happens without an influence of some sort? We know of certain choices we have and can choose to pick one based on past experiences or what friends and family or sometimes total strangers might advise. I can choose to listen to them or not. But that doesn't mean that the events that put the choice in my path were not predetermined.

I don't like the idea of people not having morals or responsibility, as some philosophers of determinism suggest we should not hold people accountable for any wrong doings because they were always going to do that. That seems like an extremely volatile yet surprisingly more free world. I would rather have 'free will' within the context of moral obligations to society.

So compatibilism based on the idea that even in chaos, patterns can be created. Then, even in a reality of determinism, there could be choices we can make thru free will.

[Reply #42 on:]

Oh and robots should never have free will. Have we not seen enough movies where that is a bad idea. Y'all have seen that show Futurama right???

[Reply #43 on:]

I once opined that Lucifer's descent into madness, falling from grace, was because he had deduced that it might be likely that God loved him greatly, not for who he was or what he had become, but rather because of what God had made him to be.  Disheartened, Lucifer lashed out in an attempt to become greater than his own making that he might truly know the love from his Father for him as he, himself.

I think there was an epizode of futrmaa about it, maybe in season 2.  Maybe it was the 1 with Korn in it.  :3

[Reply #44 on:]

If you think you were way wrong then, how are you certain you're not way wrong now?

And what does this say about our reality?  If chaos so complex, as to be impossible to understand, can bring order so precise that a small 4 legged, boned octopus can drive metal-spikes into dead-plants, in order to build a structure with semi-precise perpendicular and parallel lines, which can withstand decades, if not centuries, passing, then what is this magic place where we can speak and create, which defies our logic, processed by the very circle which is itself?  Where are we?

You're in heaven, welcome to hell, enjoy your visit on earth?

[Reply #45 on:]

But if determinism is true then it was meant to happen that way anyway.

Either chaos (in the physics sense) or quantum mechanics alone would rule out a deterministic future^*. Both together are icing on the cake.


^*Unless we live in a block universe, where there is no concept of time, and every in our perceived past and future are static and unchanging. Fuck that noise: I choose to believe that time exists.

[Reply #46 on:]

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, therefore, science predicated by logic, has already determined that every experience we experience here is objectively deterministic.

Either the assertion is true and we live in a paper doll universe, or it is flawed by its failure to be infallibly true, and science is both wrong and inherently meaningless in its endeavor to categorize, label, and comprehensively understand both the fabric of our observable universe and the constituent parts which it is comprised of.

If action -> equal opposite reaction is ever ever an incorrect, tangible explanation for the causal relationship that binds moments together to form an expression time, then science is rendered absolutely useless and highly damaging to the very notion of our existence.  Science, in all its fields of language absolutely require a rigid framework by which we may comprehend anything at all.  If that were the case, it would actually be detrimental to our well being, as the discourse about it would inevitably create lasting trends in reality that would erode away any sustainable stability by which we might continue and appreciate the seemingly random lives we've been dumped into. 

A block universe may have a concept for time, very real in fact.  Only for the observer and only by the particular angular perception by which reality is perceived at any given, finitely defined region.

Our perception of time, at its most basic and least esoteric understanding is merely the observation of two more objects animatedly traveling at different vectored velocities in a contrasted relationship between the two objects and the observer.  The third body in the three body problem is necessarily an observer of itself in relation to the other two.  That is time....and it can be manipulated in all ways, just as velocity can, and especially so for any given observer. 

E.g. how long does an hour take?  How long does an hour take while on drugs?  It's clearly a perceptual thing...and our perceptions are almost certainly faulty through lack of quantified observation due to our perceived finite ability to acquire and master skills required to observe all phenomena in all meaningful senses by which they are observable.  Time is almost always subjective to perception bias by most any observer we might know.

[Reply #47 on:]

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, therefore, science predicated by logic, has already determined that every experience we experience here is objectively deterministic.

Either the assertion is true and we live in a paper doll universe, or it is flawed by its failure to be infallibly true, and science is both wrong and inherently meaningless in its endeavor to categorize, label, and comprehensively understand both the fabric of our observable universe and the constituent parts which it is comprised of.

It is true at the macro level and to my understanding is also true at the atomic level but other factors come into play. The constant jiggling of molecules is random. The decay of radioactive atoms is random. Energy cannot be exchanged at any arbitrary amount because it is quantized. Any system comprised of more than two moving bodies is unstable and its future state cannot be accurately calculated. And I am presuming that applies to the state of the trillions of simultaneous ongoing chemical and electrical interactions taking place in a human brain.

A block universe may have a concept for time, very real in fact.  Only for the observer and only by the particular angular perception by which reality is perceived at any given, finitely defined region.

A block universe is a "frozen" universe, each "instant" existing in isolation. Where between what we perceive as two successive heart beats are 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (10⁴⁴) individual frames, and there is no such thing as time. And I "choose" to believe that we don't live in one.

Is it possible to construct a machine with free will? That depends on how you define "free will". Certainly you can incorporate elements of true randomness into its design, but reality not being deterministic does not necessarily mean that we can determine our own destinies, eh? Perhaps it's possible to construct a machine which perceives it has free will. I perceive that I have free will, and that perception is sufficient to assuage my existential angst to the degree necessary for me to live my life in relative peace.

[Reply #48 on:]

Other factors do not come into play.  They seem random because we lack the tools to observe them precisely and properly.  That's why we use QM at all: too many tiny variables, so we make educated guesses at general trends.

Friction is the irreducible force: gravity, em, weak nuc, and strong nuc are all caused by friction (collisions are momentary friction).  Thisust be true, because again, otherwise it would violate action -> equal opposite reaction conservation of temporal events, and since time is perception based, and observable reality is in fact one solid object from a given vantage point, all momentous objects must be joined in this way with regards to time. 

Are we discussing science here or magic?

[Reply #49 on:]

Are we discussing science here or magic?

<insert Arthur C. Clark quote here^*>

Are you trolling? Electrons do not experience friction when "orbiting" the nucleus, and they cannot get closer than their ground state...they never spiral in and crash into it, because energy is quantized. QM is real.

I admit that a tiny corner of my mind idly wonders whether QM is a programming hack of sorts, by the entity/entities who designed this simulation we exist in, if somehow it is a simulation.

If humans have free will, and we can understand the mechanism, we can construct robots with free will. If you write a program to evaluate a set of objects according to whatever criteria and choose the object which best matches those criteria, unless you include true or pseudo randomness or a variable weighting routine based on how many times it runs or an external input (time, phase of the moon, or whatever), given the same scenario it's going to choose the same object each time. The same can't be said for people.

If people have free will and not just the illusion of such, what's the underlying mechanism? We consciously and unconsciously determine our own criteria when evaluating a situation and in theory it should be possible to calculate every aspect of the state of our brains down to the states of individual subatomic particles, if not in practice.

The way I find peace is to think of free will in the same terms that I think of sentience and the Turing Test: if a human can converse with a machine at length, ask any question, analyze every nuance, and still cannot tell whether they're conversing with a person or a machine, is the machine effectively sentient?

If you construct a test to determine whether humans have free will, and a machine passes your test, does the machine have free will? My view is that technically free will ought not be possible, but our minds and the hardware they run on are so complex with so many factors that when taken as a whole, we effectively do have free will...and that's close enough for me.


^*"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

[Reply #50 on:]

I am not trolling.  Are you to tell me that electrons never collide with anything?  Collisions are moments of friction.  That alone suggests parts of my statements are true.  The ball bearings that keep the electrons afloat are much smaller than the electrons, so small are they, most physicists would agree, the shell of an atom is mostly empty.  They're absolutely wrong of course, and I can prove it--I have better physics and mathematics too.  Nobody who likes science wants their precious books to be wrong, and I won't spend 20 years writing out frameworks and arguing them out.  QM is fine, I no longer mind it, just don't let it represent magic, or fantasy will become your science.

[Reply #51 on:]

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, therefore, science predicated by logic, has already determined that every experience we experience here is objectively deterministic.

Either the assertion is true and we live in a paper doll universe, or it is flawed by its failure to be infallibly true, and science is both wrong and inherently meaningless in its endeavor to categorize, label, and comprehensively understand both the fabric of our observable universe and the constituent parts which it is comprised of.

It is true at the macro level and to my understanding is also true at the atomic level but other factors come into play. The constant jiggling of molecules is random. The decay of radioactive atoms is random. Energy cannot be exchanged at any arbitrary amount because it is quantized. Any system comprised of more than two moving bodies is unstable and its future state cannot be accurately calculated. And I am presuming that applies to the state of the trillions of simultaneous ongoing chemical and electrical interactions taking place in a human brain.

A block universe may have a concept for time, very real in fact.  Only for the observer and only by the particular angular perception by which reality is perceived at any given, finitely defined region.

A block universe is a "frozen" universe, each "instant" existing in isolation. Where between what we perceive as two successive heart beats are 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (10⁴⁴) individual frames, and there is no such thing as time. And I "choose" to believe that we don't live in one.

Is it possible to construct a machine with free will? That depends on how you define "free will". Certainly you can incorporate elements of true randomness into its design, but reality not being deterministic does not necessarily mean that we can determine our own destinies, eh? Perhaps it's possible to construct a machine which perceives it has free will. I perceive that I have free will, and that perception is sufficient to assuage my existential angst to the degree necessary for me to live my life in relative peace.

The frames are connected, superimpose them, that's the tree.  If you wish to believe in time, I see it in many ways, who am I to stop you believing in these things?  But if it's time you believe in, then allow me to share, causality's a must, like breathing for air.

You can tell I'm not trolling ... The things I say almost make sense.  My passions are fire, my logic like acid, tapping the keys to share thoughts, even on knowledge, sounding like magic.  Was it effort that drove me; how long did I think on these posts?  Or did the words come like water, effortlessly flowing, so that the answers to your questions could even exist?

[Reply #52 on:]

Was just asking for clarification.

[Reply #53 on:]

You figured out God's secret.  Make the thing so complex as to make it too complicated for most to distinguish the difference they perceive if they have any

We'll call it free will, you can't take it from me!  Prove I don't have it, and I'll give you my life story.  The one who can see quite clearly, which is which, which is true, are we free, will say to you, "I don't care, and I'm not telling."

[Reply #54 on:]

"Hahaha!" - God

[Reply #55 on:]

I just wanted to say I really enjoyed this thread about free will. I wish I had actually started talking to y'all when I created the account so many years ago.

But if determinism is true then it was meant to happen that way anyway. Which is my belief. However, I probably would like to believe in compatibilism more though. Yet, the definition of free will is grossly understated.  Free will is supposed to mean us making a choice without outside influence....but what in this world happens without an influence of some sort? We know of certain choices we have and can choose to pick one based on past experiences or what friends and family or sometimes total strangers might advise. I can choose to listen to them or not. But that doesn't mean that the events that put the choice in my path were not predetermined.

I don't like the idea of people not having morals or responsibility, as some philosophers of determinism suggest we should not hold people accountable for any wrong doings because they were always going to do that. That seems like an extremely volatile yet surprisingly more free world. I would rather have 'free will' within the context of moral obligations to society.

So compatibilism based on the idea that even in chaos, patterns can be created. Then, even in a reality of determinism, there could be choices we can make thru free will.

I completely agree.  A stranger once said to take off my shoes, to the trash they shall go, here put these on, new sandals I have, slip them on quick... This is a true story, about the things, a stranger once said unto me...   approximately.

He didn't buy them for me though, how did he know?  That they would fit my shoe size, and where did he come from, where did he go?

[Reply #56 on:]

I just wanted to say I really enjoyed this thread about free will. I wish I had actually started talking to y'all when I created the account so many years ago.

But if determinism is true then it was meant to happen that way anyway. Which is my belief. However, I probably would like to believe in compatibilism more though. Yet, the definition of free will is grossly understated.  Free will is supposed to mean us making a choice without outside influence....but what in this world happens without an influence of some sort? We know of certain choices we have and can choose to pick one based on past experiences or what friends and family or sometimes total strangers might advise. I can choose to listen to them or not. But that doesn't mean that the events that put the choice in my path were not predetermined.

I don't like the idea of people not having morals or responsibility, as some philosophers of determinism suggest we should not hold people accountable for any wrong doings because they were always going to do that. That seems like an extremely volatile yet surprisingly more free world. I would rather have 'free will' within the context of moral obligations to society.

So compatibilism based on the idea that even in chaos, patterns can be created. Then, even in a reality of determinism, there could be choices we can make thru free will.

I completely agree.  A stranger once said to take off my shoes, to the trash they shall go, here put these on, new sandals I have, slip them on quick... This is a true story, about the things, a stranger once said unto me...   approximately.

He didn't buy them for me though, how did he know?  That they would fit my shoe size, and where did he come from, where did he go?

Sometimes people have what you didn't know you needed. Were your old shoes falling apart? Maybe he had seen you before somewhere and thought "he needs new shoes". Maybe he was another form of you  (like The Egg).

[Reply #57 on:]

Does randomness exist? I asked my brother, a true nerd, and he said yes on a quantum level. I find it hard to believe randomness truly exists, but I'm not going to contest a science because my brain is to smooth to comprehend it.

[Reply #58 on:]

Your brother is wrong.  What does on a quantum level even mean?  If it's quantifiable, how the fuck is it random?

[Reply #59 on:]

From wiki:

In physics, a quantum is the minimum amount of any physical entity involved in an interaction. The fundamental notion that a physical property can be "quantized" is referred to as "the hypothesis of quantization". This means that the magnitude of the physical property can take on only discrete values consisting of integer multiples of one quantum.

As I understand, the bizarre weirdness of nature like true randomness and superposition of states was discovered when first investigating that energy is quantized. Where the heck is Quantum Neutrino Field when you need him? I miss having that guy around here.

And you remind me...in my "workroom" (junk room) in a small storage tray are 20+ very special Zener diodes, and what's special about them is that they are defective: they're incredibly noisy. Meaning that they generate orders of magnitude more random electrical noise than diodes should, and I saved them rather than trash them years ago as my boss instructed because I had vague ideas of building a random number generator using one of these diodes as a truly random source of noise.

So if you're trying to construct a robot with free will you can include a hardware-based source of true randomness rather than having to simulate randomness in software. So yes, you can build a robot whose actions are not deterministic, but I don't grasp how that could lead to free will rather than apparent free will. I'm stumped.

[Reply #60 on:]

By the very definition you proposed quantum is quantized and in possession of only discrete definable values.  Since when does that qualify as random?

It only appears as random because we lack the tools to properly observe quantum, since it's too fast, too small, and there's too much of it at one time.  I already told you, quantum is light and that it definitely has mass: Einstein even gave it a momentum value in special relativity--hint: you can't have momentum without mass.

Light has a specific surface area to which a maximum net force can be applied to produce a maximum vectored directional acceleration, since all quanta of light have that same surface area, they travel at the same velocity in vacuum....what's weirder still, is that I happen to know they actually bounce back and forth in space, like alternating current rather than direct current.  Again, classical mechanics at play, or we can throw causality and conservation of information directly out of the window and admit that science is a new belief (read opinion rather than fact) system, so science people can apply for their own 1st amendment rights like all the other fundamentalists.

Harry Potter and the Wheelchair Man's Blackhole!

[Reply #61 on:]

By the very definition you proposed quantum is quantized and in possession of only discrete definable values.  Since when does that qualify as random?

That's not what I was saying. Just that the investigation into the quantized nature of energy transfer (first proposed by Plank, maybe?) led to the discovery of the random, statistical aspects of QM.

And weirder things like superposition, which Schrödinger mocked with his cat-in-the-box comment, and quantum entanglement, dismissed by Einstein as "Spooky action at a distance". They were both wrong, as both have been proven in physical experiments beyond any doubt and in fact entanglement-based secure communications networks are deployed in the real world right now.

There is a huge amount of informational and educational material on the subject available with a little searching around the "net of a million lies".

But I've not seen any serious discussion of how randomness could lead to true free will.

[Reply #62 on:]

They can't have probabilities if they're truly random!!!  The very nature of QM is statistical and requires discretely defined events to make educated guesses about outcomes!!!

Of course super-entanglement is a thing, I just told you, all matter interacts with light which is constantly colliding with the light quanta in front of it and behind it.  As for superposition, clearly the answer is lack of capability in observation... When was the last time you had a full thought as fast as the quickest interaction between the smallest particles?  Never, in fact, that is demonstrable of our lack of free will in the flesh, as our autonomic actions occur so fast, we always make up the reason why we did a thing after the fact.  Fact is, we don't know why we do the things we do, at all.  Once I finally admitted that to myself, that I didn't know me, then I knew why I do the things that I do, yet I know not when it was decided, the things I do, which I only knew how I knew why much later in life.

Feynman would completely agree with my assertions.  We'd also discuss the atomic mechanics of electromagnetism (hint: read up on imbalanced forces within magnets that he discusses, then study your ford toruses!) and how all of the natural forces are definitely reducible to friction.

[Reply #63 on:]

As an aside... Randomness is a thing, but it's abstract, esoteric, and arbitrary.  If you like relativity, start imagining your perspective as the observer, and how the things which define you are the very things you're observing!

E.g. Your zener diodes are a perfect representation of randomness from the perspective of humans, because we couldn't adequately observe all of the nuanced detailed variables which produce the noise in those diodes.  Sometimes it's a one-way gate :shrug-happy-face:

What's the real difference between two things if you can't tell the difference though?  Or are double blind studies the new heretical face of science?

Edit: All software is inherently defined by the limits and characteristics of the hardware it is run on.  Zener diodes to dell computers.

Double edit: I once read an interesting tale about a software engineer tasked with writing blackjack for a company to show off where the game cheated in favor of the clients--this was so against the virtuous principles of the software engineer that he wrote the program (almost certainly in assembly) keeping in a mind a minute detail about how the hardware handled memory overflows, there by making a game of black jack cheat, but to the players disadvantage.  It took several years, and many new hires looking through the code before someone noticed the stroke of genius in the painting, and the mastery by which the painter had softwared.

[Reply #64 on:]

Who the hell wrote those posts?  What the fuck am I reading?