And what if we end up being able to predict what goes on in this “other realm”? This just pushes the problem back behind the curtain, instead of confronting it.
Well, the question is whether our thoughts are deterministic or not. If you reset the universe to the same point multiple times, would everyone necessarily do exactly the same things? Or might there be variation? There being an extra-universal influence on our thoughts that wouldn’t get reset gives the possibility of non-determinism, even if there is some ability to predict what it might do in known circumstances.
Actually running that test though would be… difficult. We only get to see one of the runs, so we have nothing to compare to.
So is our sense of free will an illusion? Or meta-information that’s leaking in from somewhere due to incomplete sandboxing? Really hard to know for sure. But, at the same time, does it actually matter?
You don’t have to assume that the physical universe is deterministic, so that any indeterministic “swerve” can only from another dimension...you can assume that the physical universe isn’t entirely deterministic.
There are indeed multiple ways it could work. And it may be tough to decide how to draw any boundaries. Is it some totally separate realm that only interacts with ours in the one area? Or is it something that’s simply a little outside of the four dimensions we can normally perceive and it’s tied in everywhere in subtle ways and our cognition is merely the only spot where we easily notice it? We might try to model it in a number of different ways depending on exactly what we find. But we’re almost certainly going to have problems trying to fully understand something so different from what our brains are built to work with, especially when getting into things like this where it’s definitely possible that attempting to understand it could have a feedback loop with how we think at a fundamental level.
And I can’t really think of a way that we could know for sure if our universe is deterministic or not. You’d have to be able to see multiple runs of it and observe if they were identical or not… It’s kind of like the theoretically O(1) “randomize data, check if sorted, if not then destroy the universe” sort algorithm...
Is it some totally separate realm that only interacts with ours in the one area? Or is it something that’s simply a little outside of the four dimensions we can normally perceive and it’s tied in everywhere in subtle ways and our cognition is merely the only spot where we easily notice i
And what if we end up being able to predict what goes on in this “other realm”? This just pushes the problem back behind the curtain, instead of confronting it.
Well, the question is whether our thoughts are deterministic or not. If you reset the universe to the same point multiple times, would everyone necessarily do exactly the same things? Or might there be variation? There being an extra-universal influence on our thoughts that wouldn’t get reset gives the possibility of non-determinism, even if there is some ability to predict what it might do in known circumstances.
Actually running that test though would be… difficult. We only get to see one of the runs, so we have nothing to compare to.
So is our sense of free will an illusion? Or meta-information that’s leaking in from somewhere due to incomplete sandboxing? Really hard to know for sure. But, at the same time, does it actually matter?
You don’t have to assume that the physical universe is deterministic, so that any indeterministic “swerve” can only from another dimension...you can assume that the physical universe isn’t entirely deterministic.
There are indeed multiple ways it could work. And it may be tough to decide how to draw any boundaries. Is it some totally separate realm that only interacts with ours in the one area? Or is it something that’s simply a little outside of the four dimensions we can normally perceive and it’s tied in everywhere in subtle ways and our cognition is merely the only spot where we easily notice it? We might try to model it in a number of different ways depending on exactly what we find. But we’re almost certainly going to have problems trying to fully understand something so different from what our brains are built to work with, especially when getting into things like this where it’s definitely possible that attempting to understand it could have a feedback loop with how we think at a fundamental level.
And I can’t really think of a way that we could know for sure if our universe is deterministic or not. You’d have to be able to see multiple runs of it and observe if they were identical or not… It’s kind of like the theoretically O(1) “randomize data, check if sorted, if not then destroy the universe” sort algorithm...
Or not even a little bit ouside.