You can’t even predict the weather more than a few days in advance, and you can’t predict the movement of individual gas molecules for longer than a tiny fraction of a second, even if you knew their exact positions and velocities, which you can’t. So these hypothetical determinations are of no consequence. Add quantum indeterminacy and your hypothetical exact prediction of the future becomes a probability distribution over possible worlds, i.e. an exact calculation of your ignorance.
The question I am more interested in is, why are all these people in recent years — Robert Sapolsky, Sam Harris, and others — proclaiming that no-one can really choose anything? Because regardless of all the careful explanations of what they really mean, which amount to denying their own headlines, it’s the headline bailey that people will remember, not the tiny, empty motte on the hill that leaves normality unaffected.
I need to definitely educate myself on chaos theory and quantum mechanics, but as mentioned in normality unaffected you linked above, and my comment above, we (humans) seems to be very predictable atleast in the short term, and if you have the exact body state and the algorithms it runs you can predict what we will do in the next moment given an input.
I didn’t look into what Sam Harris said but based on my involvement with Robert’s books and videos, my interest in this is that, this way of looking at things makes us come out of the human exceptionalism argument, that we are just doing computation and not so different from AI doing computation, and gives us a more unified way of looking at consciousness and agency.
I am not trying to paint a depressing picture but want to make this view more mainstream. This view actually made me feel more in control of my body, because I can choose the inputs I give it so that I can function at maximum capacity, while you can say that I was that kind of a person to begin with, I want to actively experiment and talk about my results and that could lead to more and more people doing it and getting great results for themselves.
If we do solve neural inputs and hacking the brain through companies like Neuralink, this paints a more rosy picture on how we can solve any issue related to the brain.
Some fun examples:
eat the most healthy food but hack your brain’s input to think you are eating your favourite food.
exercise automatically while you are watching a movie and feel no pain etc.
You can’t even predict the weather more than a few days in advance, and you can’t predict the movement of individual gas molecules for longer than a tiny fraction of a second, even if you knew their exact positions and velocities, which you can’t. So these hypothetical determinations are of no consequence. Add quantum indeterminacy and your hypothetical exact prediction of the future becomes a probability distribution over possible worlds, i.e. an exact calculation of your ignorance.
The question I am more interested in is, why are all these people in recent years — Robert Sapolsky, Sam Harris, and others — proclaiming that no-one can really choose anything? Because regardless of all the careful explanations of what they really mean, which amount to denying their own headlines, it’s the headline bailey that people will remember, not the tiny, empty motte on the hill that leaves normality unaffected.
I need to definitely educate myself on chaos theory and quantum mechanics, but as mentioned in normality unaffected you linked above, and my comment above, we (humans) seems to be very predictable atleast in the short term, and if you have the exact body state and the algorithms it runs you can predict what we will do in the next moment given an input.
I didn’t look into what Sam Harris said but based on my involvement with Robert’s books and videos, my interest in this is that, this way of looking at things makes us come out of the human exceptionalism argument, that we are just doing computation and not so different from AI doing computation, and gives us a more unified way of looking at consciousness and agency.
I am not trying to paint a depressing picture but want to make this view more mainstream.
This view actually made me feel more in control of my body, because I can choose the inputs I give it so that I can function at maximum capacity, while you can say that I was that kind of a person to begin with, I want to actively experiment and talk about my results and that could lead to more and more people doing it and getting great results for themselves.
If we do solve neural inputs and hacking the brain through companies like Neuralink, this paints a more rosy picture on how we can solve any issue related to the brain.
Some fun examples:
eat the most healthy food but hack your brain’s input to think you are eating your favourite food.
exercise automatically while you are watching a movie and feel no pain etc.