On another note, I buy the typical compatibilist ideas about free will, but there’s also this idea I was kicking around that I don’t think is really very interesting but might be for some reason (pulled from a comment I made on Facebook):
“I don’t know if it ultimately makes sense, but I sometimes think about the possibility of ‘super’ free will beyond compatibilist free willl, where you have a Turing oracle that humans can access but whose outputs they can’t algorithmicly verify. The only way humans can perform hypercomputation is by having faith in the oracle. Since a Turing oracle is construbtable from Chaitin’s constant and is thus the only truly random source of information in the universe, this would (at least on a pattern-match-y surface level) seem to supply some of the indeterminism sought by libertarians, while also letting humans transcend deterministic, i.e. computable, constraints in a way that looks like having more agency than would otherwise be possible. So in a universe without super free will no one would be able to perform hypercomputation ‘cuz they wouldn’t have access to an oracle. But much of this speculation comes from trying to rationalize why theologians would say ‘if there were no God then there wouldn’t be any free will’.”
Implicit in this model is that universes where you can’t do hypercomputation are significantly less significant than universes where you can, and so only with hypercomputation can you truly transcend the mundanity of a deterministic universe. But I don’t think such a universe actually captures libertarians’ intuitions about what is necessary for free will, so I doubt it’s a useful model.
I’ll have to check into compatabilism more. It had never occurred to me that determinism was compatible with omniscience/intercession until my commenting with Vladimir_Nesov. In seeing wiki’s definition, it sounded more reasonable than I remembered, so perhaps I never really understood what compatabilism was suggesting.
I’m not positive I get your explanations (due to simple ignorance), but it sounds slightly like what Adam Lee presented here concerning a prediction machine; namely that such a thing could be built, but that actually knowing the prediction would be impossible for it would set off something of an infinite forward calculation of factoring in the prediction, that the human knows the prediction itself, that the prediction machine knows that the human knows the prediction… and then trying to figure out what the new action will actually be.
On another note, I buy the typical compatibilist ideas about free will, but there’s also this idea I was kicking around that I don’t think is really very interesting but might be for some reason (pulled from a comment I made on Facebook):
“I don’t know if it ultimately makes sense, but I sometimes think about the possibility of ‘super’ free will beyond compatibilist free willl, where you have a Turing oracle that humans can access but whose outputs they can’t algorithmicly verify. The only way humans can perform hypercomputation is by having faith in the oracle. Since a Turing oracle is construbtable from Chaitin’s constant and is thus the only truly random source of information in the universe, this would (at least on a pattern-match-y surface level) seem to supply some of the indeterminism sought by libertarians, while also letting humans transcend deterministic, i.e. computable, constraints in a way that looks like having more agency than would otherwise be possible. So in a universe without super free will no one would be able to perform hypercomputation ‘cuz they wouldn’t have access to an oracle. But much of this speculation comes from trying to rationalize why theologians would say ‘if there were no God then there wouldn’t be any free will’.”
Implicit in this model is that universes where you can’t do hypercomputation are significantly less significant than universes where you can, and so only with hypercomputation can you truly transcend the mundanity of a deterministic universe. But I don’t think such a universe actually captures libertarians’ intuitions about what is necessary for free will, so I doubt it’s a useful model.
I’ll have to check into compatabilism more. It had never occurred to me that determinism was compatible with omniscience/intercession until my commenting with Vladimir_Nesov. In seeing wiki’s definition, it sounded more reasonable than I remembered, so perhaps I never really understood what compatabilism was suggesting.
I’m not positive I get your explanations (due to simple ignorance), but it sounds slightly like what Adam Lee presented here concerning a prediction machine; namely that such a thing could be built, but that actually knowing the prediction would be impossible for it would set off something of an infinite forward calculation of factoring in the prediction, that the human knows the prediction itself, that the prediction machine knows that the human knows the prediction… and then trying to figure out what the new action will actually be.