I don't feel this is an accurate portrayal of libertarianism.
What you talk about is definitely a problem in anarchism. When there's no regulation of violence then the most powerful private actors will make the rules and the anarchistic system will vanish.
Under libertarianism though, the government exists and has license to exercise force on behalf of its citizens. The government does not have to be weak in the sense of physical strength. A libertarian government might have an impressive uniformed military force in addition to private armed militia. What sets a libertarian government apart is two things: 1. the government operates pretty much purely as an instrument of force (that is, it does not attempt to dictate morality or interfere in economic issues) 2. the government's charter is centered around preserving/maximizing personal freedom for all of the citizens of the nation over the long term (this mandate provides direction for the government instead of morality).
A libertarian government is obligated to act when the overall freedom of its citizenry is threatened by internal or external threats. This almost always means stepping on the freedoms of some of the individual citizens (perhaps taking away particularly destructive weapons from private actors, increasing taxes to maintain a larger standing military, or drafting citizens into the military service during a crisis). However, it is understood by libertarians that such violations of freedom will lead to greater overall freedom and is therefore worth it in the long run (if an expensive standing military and an inability to own my own nukes preserves my other freedoms, then so be it).
When a libertarian talks about "weak" government, what they're really talking about is a government that has a weak impact on its citizens daily lives (and therefore spends comparatively little so taxes can be low). In order for this to happen in practice, the government has to have its hands tied in many important areas (and therefore "weak" compared to more authoritarian governments), or else the human civil servants that compose the government will certainly abuse their power. For instance, if the government has unlimited power to lock up individuals without trial then such abuse will almost certainly occur (and the other citizens can't do anything about it because it's legal). However, if they are obligated by their own laws to release or try prisoners within a reasonably short time frame, then there is more hope that abuse will be minimized. That said, when a libertarian government is acting within its defined boundaries it can be extremely strong. If someone is about to detonate a nuke in a populated area, the government is not going to worry about that person's freedoms...they'll send in the military, because that person threatens the freedoms of many more individuals.
I consider myself libertarian (as defined above) but I lean slightly centrist in practice. The government is ultimately an apparatus of violence and I feel strongly that we should keep that isolated (otherwise we end up with the situation where people use the government's force to steal from other people, which is common in both non-democratic and democratic governments). However, I support several more centralist measures too. In particular I see disaster relief, investment in and maintenance of infrastructure, (limited) land conservation, and basic science funding as positive government intervention. A purely libertarian government would have no place for these measures, as they make economic and moral decisions that as the theory goes should be made by the market.
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Oh, one last thing. Constant distraction is indeed a bad thing for deep thought, but this isn't really a difficult problem to solve. One simply needs to cut down on the distractions. Go somewhere quiet and unplug nearly all forms of communication. Only leave open one channel of communication (if that) and only give it to people who can be trusted to only contact you that way if it is truly important. For most people the world isn't going to stop because they're not there to keep it turning (or at the very least there are regular times in the day where your absence will not be critical).
There are some very important jobs that require you to be in constant connection with the rest of the world. If you get into one of those careers, don't expect to think deeply very much. If deep intellectual thought is important to you, then you should consider getting a different job. This is one of several reasons I gave up on a career as a system administrator.
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The main problem with this idea (other than the fact that it is a paradoxically self-defeating idea) is that they are comparing modern popular culture with past intellectual culture.
Do they not remember a not so distant time when "nerd" and "geek" were insults in mainstream culture? Computer geeks only get any respect today because they make the wheels turn for everyone else. It's the same sort of respect a airplane pilot or train conductor gets.
My grandfather had to defy his father in order to graduate from high school because his father felt that much education was useless...the past is full of such stories that just get forgotten with the passage of time.
In any case, what this writer is observing is a sort of Jevons Paradox for information. As the efficiency of exchanging information electronically has increased, it has become more and more heavily used...and in particular it is being used for more and more things that would have not been worthwhile when efficiency was lower (and therefore the cost higher). As one might expect, most of the things that would not be worthwhile at a high cost are not particularly worthwhile. Usually it's because the information has little to no practical or intellectual value ("I'm eating a delicious sandwich"), but it can also be because the idea is unpolished and unready.
This second case really changes our perception of the emergence of world-changing ideas even in intellectual circles. In the olden days, a new idea would seemingly emerge fully formed from out of the blue. One day you open the paper and there's an article on this newfangled "airplane" thing that just made its first flight yesterday in North Carolina. Perhaps instead you walk into a bookstore and at the recommendation of one of your friends you pick up copy of this Nietzsche guy's book. For most consumers of ideas in this era, there's a clear dividing line between the world before the idea and the world after. However, for the originator of the idea there's not such a clear line. Big ideas have long private and semi-public histories before they reached their final public form. In the electronic age, we are more likely to be privy to this long history. When the big breakthrough happens we're much less likely to realize its importance, because its really just an incremental but important step up from what we knew before. In this way, even highly intelligent people can miss big changes as they occur. Instead, we usually notice years later...when we wake up one morning and HOLY SHIT THERE'S A ROBOT CLEANING MY FLOOR.
It'll be interesting to look back and see which big ideas stand the test of time. There's a good chance it will be the ideas of intellectuals that few people know about or take seriously today, like this guy: http://marshallbrain.com/ or this guy http://www.peoplescapitalism.org/
While this may be true, the biggest problem with using the Dragon capsule to carry human cargo at the moment is that it currently lacks an escape system. If the Falcon 9 lifting the capsule into orbit was to fail during launch, there's a good chance that it would result in horrible explosive death for the passenger. This isn't a minor risk either, several similar launch systems (Proton, Atlas IV) used for cargo launches have a roughly 90% success rate...meaning that our hypothetical passenger would have around a 10% chance of dying horribly. Now it may turn out that the Falcon 9 ends up with a much better record than such rockets...but at the moment it only has 2 launches under its belt, which is not nearly enough data to make a useful reliability estimate.
How about adding a backup parachute system to the hoverbike itself? That is, it quickly ejects a parachute for the bike and rider when power is lost in the air. Since it's much lighter than a helicopter, it might work. I dunno.
A massive increase in available materials. Most of it is in our homes and workplaces.
Are you aware that as of 2008, 83% of the steel in the US was recycled?
As long as we have energy, it is possible to recycle everything else. Necessity is the mother of invention and a dwindling resource is worth more effort/energy to recycle and these same incentives will lead to better techniques for recycling that resource. Also, alternatives and previously uneconomical reserves will be tapped into.
Even energy isn't as big a problem as it might first appear. While it can't be recycled, there is plenty of energy to be tapped out there...
Errr... yes it does. Or were you always a good driver / writer / programmer? Training is exactly the process of making someone good at something!
I may be a good programmer...but despite all my training I'm still not a good driver. I'm not bad enough to be a serious danger (no crashes yet), but when I compare my driving to that of my friends there's a world of difference.
I'm an atheist on the Internet but I hardly talk about God. Frankly, you don't have any evidence to back up your assertions...how do you tell that someone on the Internet is an atheist unless they're talking about their atheism? You can't unless you're reading something you know is written by someone who earlier identified themselves as an atheist, which probably means they're very passionate about their position...much more than your average person.
The point is that there are a lot more people who are more averagely passionate about certain topics that have a natural anti-group component than the visible leaders and internet trolls. You just don't hear these people's opinions because they're quiet about them most of the time.
Also, your "answer" is just a variation on the old-fashioned homophobe attack. If someone hates homosexuals, clearly it is because they secretly want gay sex...not because they are disgusted by gay sex or anything. That makes total sense, amirite? They may be wrong in hating homosexuals over something petty like that, but it does not follow that their hatred flows from a secret desire for gay sex. If this argument made sense, then you could say that free software advocates fight against proprietary software because they secretly want truckloads of money and tight control over the use of their software.
I have a mostly academic perspective of this debate.
Basically, the goal of process is to achieve high quality code at a low cost, or to put it another way the goal is to make development efficient. How this objective is achieved isn't really that important. Anyway, due to the massive complexity of a development team (member personality and interpersonal chemistry are complex affairs) and the plethora of different software objectives/metrics (nuclear plant safety software is measured mostly by lack of failures while social networking software is mostly measured in adoption rates), there's not really one right process.
However, just leaving it at that isn't very informative. It turns out there is one key element to process that everything good about process flows from...which is collecting data on what the developers are doing and taking the time to analyze that data to find areas where the process can be improved, leading to constant improvement in the efficiency of the process. Collect (Quantitative) Data -> Analyze Data -> Adjust Process -> Goto Collect Data.
Keep in mind that the data collection and improvement analysis are also part of the process. Collecting too much data (or the wrong kind of data) can be very detrimental as it takes time away from the developers doing real work to handle paperwork and constant navel gazing sucks up otherwise useful time. On the flip side of the coin, too little data collection will not allow you to construct an accurate picture of what's going on and good analysis of that data requires real time and effort...but this effort will pay off in the long run by making the real work more efficient for many years.
This process also takes some experimentation. "Let's try adding/dropping/modifying this practice and see what happens." "Oh, the data looks good after we implemented this, so let's continue to do it." "Hmm, this caused a slight decrease in performance due to time usage, I don't think it's worth it so lets drop it." It also takes some deeper thought. "Well, there was a slight negative impact in the short run, but this should have a positive long term impact, so lets hold out on judging it just yet." "This software is needed for a one-shot event, so we could drop all our long-term processes this one time to save effort." etc.
Existing processes and best practices are great places to look for ways to improve your process. "Code reviews have well known positive benefits across a wide range of situations, so we should incorporate that into our process." This really cuts down on the amount of experimentation needed to find a good process. However, following these suggestions blindly will lead to all sorts of trouble because as several other posters have mentioned it's a form of "cargo-cult engineering". One might adopt a practice that's good for high-quality high-cost systems when your goal is to make an acceptable-quality low-cost system quickly. One might adopt a practice that has a subtle negative effect, like driving away a good programmer or wasting small amounts of developer time for no benefit. If the boss is blind enough, they might even adopt a practice that completely destroys the team and project.
Constant analysis and review also helps reduce problems like valuable people leaving due to process. If they know the new practice they hate is only experimental and they'll be able to make a case against it at review time it makes it easier for them to tough it out for a while.
Once the process of continual improvement gets started, the team will constantly get better and better. Realistically there will be ups and downs, but the team will recover from the downs (such as a valuable person leaving), putting them at a nearly constant state of high efficiency...and the extra work put into maintaining and improving the process will be worth it.
Now of course there's more to good process than just striving to be in a state of constant improvement, but that would take far too long to talk about in depth. It includes things lik
I think this is a good question, but I'm having a little bit of trouble answering it and I think this demonstrates a weakness of this particular question.
I'm a relatively new programmer, just out of college working at my first job. I have several past programming accomplishments that I could choose from, but I'm sort of ashamed of all of them. Why? I've been getting better and better as time goes on, so when I look back at my past work I'm extremely critical. My previous work sucked compared to my present work. That's not to say my past work wasn't valuable, as I had to work on these previous projects to learn what I know now. Also, my past work isn't objectively bad (or so I've heard from others). However, when asked this question I sit there and think about it for several minutes and eventually it becomes "what am I least ashamed of?" rather than "what am I proudest of?". I'm also tempted to answer with something like "getting through school" (which I am actually proud of due to all the hard work I put into it, and I see as programmer related)...but I bet this is one of the worst possible answers to give a recruiter.
I'm like an artist who has trouble putting together a portfolio because I want to sweep my entire learning process under the rug, but has little to no present work to stick in the portfolio. Even worse, anything I do now will probably end up being heavily criticized by my future self, putting me back in the same boat. I think it is likely that many skilled programmers that are just getting started have this issue, as programming is a creative endeavor and I see this all the time in other creative endeavors. It's sort of the inverse of the Dunning–Kruger effect...whereas the incompetent can't tell how awful their work is, the competent see all the itty-bitty problems in their work in gruesome detail. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
The weakness of this question is that it is not orthogonal. It is testing for skill, self-confidence, and a lack of perfectionism all at once. Unfortunately, slightly low self-confidence and a high degree of perfectionism can be positive attributes in a worker (as long as these attributes aren't so extreme as to be crippling). Too high a degree of self-confidence can lead to interpersonal conflict...or can lead to the situation where the person wastes a ton of time trying to do something themselves when it could have been easily resolved by talking to someone else. A degree of perfectionism prevents sloppy work being passed off as sufficient and leads to a constant drive for improvement (though of course it can also lead to irrational decisions about putting effort into something long after the law of diminishing returns kicks in).
It's still a good question, but you need to make sure that you account for people who would deal with this problem poorly precisely because they are skilled, otherwise you might let a gem slip through your hands.
Lack of shame is another problem that these unqualified employees display... or is lack of shame OUR perception? I know I would feel shame if I inserted myself into a situation where I was not qualified. But maybe that's just me and a bunch of other like-minded geeks here on slashdot. (Then again, when I insert my opinions here and someone with greater knowledge calls me an idiot, I don't often feel much shame... though some form of hate or anger results at times.)
I misunderstood your argument earlier. You're right that your proposed system is not necessarily stochastic, as you were using that as an interface between your free will and the physical world rather than proposing it was free will itself.
However, what I said earlier still stands. The idea you propose in this post is non-systematic (and if not, it must be deterministic or stochastic).
The main problem is the 'choice is made here' marker you mention. Planting that flag there and leaving it there is just giving up...the explanation for the marker is basically "MAGIC!". If we've isolated the decision making part of the system, why can't we study it? Let's assume we study it in depth and that we haven't missed any possible systematic explanations. Either we must have found a system that explains how it works (in a deterministic or stochastic way)...or there is no system that explains how it works and thus it is non-systematic. There is no other possibility! Since free will can't be constrained by a predictive system, true free will must be non-systematic if it exists at all.
Further, I don't think a consciousness that exists as a subcomponent would "understand" things. Understanding is a very high level mental property while consciousness is either an emergent property ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence ) or a very small subatomic thing. If consciousness is emergent (arising from the entire brain) then it understands what the brain understands because it basically is the brain. However, if it is a tiny choice-maker thingamajig that communicates through particle decay or whatever...then either it doesn't understand anything or it contains its own brain-like system inside of itself that can understand things (which gets into homunculus territory).
Here I actually have some evidence to back me up. Your consciousness only "understands" what your brain understands. Human experience clearly shows that messing with the brain also messes with your consciousness and its "understanding" of the world. One example is getting drunk. Among other things, it impairs your memory. Neuroscience has tracked down alcohol's effects on the GABA system as a prime suspect in this memory impairment. However, your consciousness is also affected as you have no memory and no direct understanding of the events that occurred while you were under the influence. How could this molecular-scale brain impact have an impact on a quantum-scale consciousness? It would be roughly like trying to split an atom using a hammer. Does getting drunk also impair your consciousness through some other channel? How?
Altered states of consciousness make a lot more sense when you look at consciousness from an emergent rather than an atomic perspective. The brain is affected, therefore your emergent consciousness is affected too. Therefore I think that consciousness is probably emergent. It's possible to make up other explanations that make sense, so I can't say this is true with certainty though.
I don't see why you're not impressed by Watson. Are you sure you understand how Watson works and the implications of Watson's success?
Let's assume for a moment that Watson is just a hyper-powerful chess computer. Watson can answer natural language general questions (posed in the form of a question) with a higher success rate than most humans. Does that mean that we're barely better than chess computers ourselves? What will these "chess computers" be able to do after 10 more years of hardware improvement?
Of course the reality is that Watson isn't just a chess computer. Watson's algorithms are much more powerful than the nearly brute-force approach of chess computers. That's not to say that Watson is on a human level...or that you could talk to Watson (as it lacks speech recognition)...or that Watson thinks anything like a human (does a submarine swim?)...but none of that matters. The point is that Watson can do very complex things that only humans could do before and it loo
I already handled your argument previously. The potential systems you propose are stochastic.
The problem is that such free will isn't really free. It is unpredictable, but in a merely random way. These particle decay-like events are essentially truly random dice rolls. It would be as though your life decisions were made by die rolls (well, more accurately die rolls filtered through layers of deterministic systems and possibly other stochastic systems, as there are clearly deterministic elements to our world's system).
In order for a person's free will to really be free, it can't be constrained by a system of prediction. Otherwise it's either a machine (deterministic) or a machine containing perfect dice as components (stochastic).
Consider your suggestion here:
Our consciousness for example might be in some way a non collapsed quantom state that reaches a decision and then acts by causing the decay of a particle.
How does our consciousness "reach a decision"?
You imply that this decision-making process comes about prior to the random decay. Is consciousness just a deeper system that is using a crummy signal to relay its desires to the wider world?
Really the interesting part of this proposal is the consciousness and its decision making process. Is it systematic? If so is it deterministic or stochastic? If we can come up with a scientific theory about how it works then it obliterates the illusion of free will that not understanding it creates. If we can't come up with such a theory then it's a non-understandable non-scientific phenomena.
As for cutting off avenues of exploration, that's a good thing as long as we know such avenues really are fruitless. For instance, it's good that we stopped exploring the notion of perpetual motion machines. Trying to tackle the perpetual motion problem will waste our efforts and never get us anywhere because it's impossible. It's better to use our efforts elsewhere. Furthermore, reducing the number of possibilities makes it easier to focus on the most fruitful ones. The whole world could potentially be explained with invisible magical leprechauns, but it would be tiring if at every scientific conference there was some guy who demanded to know if this new theory accounted for the leprechauns. So even possible avenues should be downgraded if they are unlikely...at least until someone makes a great case for that avenue.
Admittedly many of the deepest questions we have are almost complete mysteries. What is consciousness? What causes it? Why are we here instead of somewhere else? Why is consciousness persistent? Can we transfer it? I can't answer these questions, but I do know that their answers will either be systematic (and therefore not include free will) or non-systematic (and therefore non-scientific). My bet is on systematic and us just being extremely ignorant about such matters at the present day.
Finally, putting a time limit on strong AI is silly. Why? It's not a time based thing. AI researchers could all start twiddling their thumbs tomorrow and 20 years from now we will have made no progress in AI. Furthermore, strong AI is a grand project. It's not something that will come out of some kid's garage (at least at first). It will take a national-scale (or at least corporate-scale) effort many years to complete.
Probably the best thing to compare it to is permanently colonizing the Moon (or maybe Mars or something even further away depending on the difficulty). If the moon isn't colonized in 20 years then I suppose it'll never happen, right?/sarcasm The more effort we put into this project, the sooner it will be accomplished, but as we still don't have all the technology yet it's unknown exactly how many years it will take even if we give it our all. How will the moonies deal with living in low-G? How will they sustain themselves with food and air? How will they make replacement parts? How many people do we need to send to get a self sustaining population? How will we
You are drunk and it shows. It's probably a good idea to sleep it off and resume when you're sober.
I'd like to continue here on Slashdot as long as we can, but when the article gets archived I'll contact you at that address if we're still arguing. Don't worry about hurrying.
I'd like to point out here that you haven't really attempted to address my main argument about free will. If we can understand true free will then it is not really "free". Therefore it either must not exist or it must be a non-understandable phenomena (that is, non-scientific). Unless this argument can be overturned, those are the only two options. Tell me how understandable free will is possible.
A few things about what you said here: Occam's razor is a rule of thumb, not a hard and fast rule. You can't prove anything with it. You can only suggest that one explanation is better than another equivalent explanation. In fact, all else being equal Occam's razor would generally support a free will-less explanation over a free will-full explanation...adding free will to the mix when things can be explained without it would generally increase the number of assumptions being made. Additionally, Ockham would probably be aghast at both of us, him being a medieval theologian and all.
What is meaning? How do things acquire meaning? Do things need to have meaning? These are very difficult philosophical questions and frankly it's hard to get people to agree on what a term like "meaning" means...
In my opinion, meaning is acquired through the relationships between things. Imagine a separate universe where there is nothing but a single muffin floating endlessly through an infinite expanse of empty space. This universe is largely devoid of meaning...the muffin doesn't have a story, it's always been there and always will be. There's no other objects for it to be near, and even the universe that contains it doesn't have edges for the muffin to run into eventually. Any given time frame will be essentially identical to all the others. Of course, by imagining this universe you are giving meaning to it by creating it in your head...but we should imagine that it wasn't created in our heads, but rather that it just exists out there on a lonely plane of existence for no reason.
However, take that same muffin and put it on my desk and suddenly it is dripping with meaning. It was baked a few hours ago by my mother for the purpose of delivering delicious delicious calories to my body so I can continue to live and write responses to online philosophical arguments (actually, I'm making this up, though I want a muffin now). All the energy and matter that went into the muffin had a backstory and will have a continuing story afterwards. It is related to everything in the whole universe at this very moment. The whole muffin vibrates with meaning as it moves towards fulfilling its purpose...a human-created purpose.
Actually, the really crazy thing is that it's impossible to avoid meaning. Even a completely empty lonely universe is related...to itself. This is where things get really maddening. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_loop
This argument has a point. I want to convince you and anyone else who reads it that free will is either non-understandable or false and that the brain is probably a Turing machine equivalent (and therefore AI is do-able using the same kind of technology we have today)...because I believe these things to be true at the moment and I'd like to hear other people's arguments so I can improve my own argument or even change my mind if I realize I'm wrong. It doesn't matter whether this came about due to me exercising my free will or due to me being predestined to do so, either way it is meaningful...it is not pointless.
As for my use of "not absolutely true", I mean it in the same way that Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation is "not absolutely true". It's not true, but it's close enough to the truth to be useful without the added complexity of
I don't believe in free will the same way you do. I do have a useful conception of free will, but it's not the same as yours.
The basic problem with your argument is that you are taking free will on faith. This is fine if you're willing to accept other things on faith, but you don't seem to be that kind of person.
Let's assume free will exists and that we can rationally analyze it (that is, it is a system). How could free will work?
Let's say that after years of study we have put together a scientific theory of free will. Well, we should be able to use this theory to make predictions about free will...but this defeats the purpose of free will doesn't it?
Now, it might be that this theory is stochastic so we can't absolutely determine what you will do next. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic However, is this really any better? Instead of your actions being determined by your current state, they are determined by your current state AND a random roll of the dice. You're still not really in control of your destiny...the random elements described in the theory are.
There's a contradiction here. Free will can't be both exist and be systematic. Therefore, one of those must be false...either there is no free will or free will is not systematic (and therefore not understandable by science, so it must be spiritual or something along those lines).
I'm not willing to give up on science so easily, so I believe that the answer is that true free will does not exist. Our actions are determined by the rules of the universe, our previous state, and possibly by random microscopic physical elements.
That said, free will is not a useless concept. There's two areas where it makes sense.
Free will is a useful conception for everyday life, even if it is not absolutely true. Think of it as a rule of thumb that works well while ignoring finer details. In particular, it helps one avoid developing an external locus of control. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locus_of_control This is important because one's decisions really do matter, even if they are pre-determined. A student who works hard to get good grades will generally benefit in the long run regardless of how they came to that decision. Someone who uses determinism to justify bad decisions is just looking for an excuse to avoid the consequences of their actions.
Additionally, free will rings true to some extent even in a completely deterministic system. There are four classes of computable deterministic systems: static, repetitive, chaotic, and complex. If human minds are deterministic then they are complex systems. An interesting property of complex systems is that they are incompressible. You can compress orderly systems into a simple mathematical form that determines their state at a given time absolutely. You can compress chaotic systems into a probabilistic form that determines their behavior at a high level. You cannot do that to a complex system. The only way to perfectly predict a complex system's behavior is to create an exact replica of it and watch what happens. So in a sense complex systems have "free will" because their behavior cannot be practically predicted beforehand. If you'd like to know more, look up Stephen Wolfram and his book. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_new_kind_of_science
It's true that not every system that is not a Turing machine is capable of hypercomputation, because lower classes of machine exist...as do "better" machines that end up falling into the same class as Turing machines (which includes things like present day quantum computers). However, these machines are all equivalent to a Turing machine due to the Church-Turing thesis. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church-turing_thesis (The "better" machines are just faster.) Therefore they are all capable of being run on computers...unless they involve hypercomputation or are not systematic at all.
Actually, going over the Church-Turing thesis article reminded me of three things: 1. It's possible that the Church-Turing thesis is wrong, as it is not a theorem but an extremely well supported hypothesis. In that case, my argument does indeed fall flat. 2. It looks like Penrose was arguing that our brains use hypercomputation, so he was taking this all into consideration. 3. It is mentioned that there could be possibly be systems that involve hypercomputation that we can't take advantage of. I doubt this is the case, but I suppose it is possible. However, if this is the case then it does not bode well for the brain being in a higher class than a computer, because it would be a hypercomputer in a universe where those aren't allowed.
Essentially, if the brain is not a computer (or more accurately a system that could be run on a computer), then it is either capable of hypercomputation or not a system at all (magical).
Here's an argument in favor of the brain being a Turing machine (or lower class of machine): 1. Any system that is not a Turing machine or emulatable on a Turing machine will be capable of hypercomputation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercomputation and will therefore be capable of being fashioned into a hypercomputer. 2. A hypercomputer can solve undecidable problems such as the halting problem and almost certainly can solve any decidable problem in a tractable timeframe. 3. Despite millennia of observation, the brain has not been observed to be capable of hypercomputation, such as the above. 4. Therefore the brain is almost certainly a Turing machine (or lower class of machine, such as a DFA).
I see only three possibilities: 1. The brain is a Turing machine or lower class of machine. 2. In the future we will discover how to do hypercomputation with our brains and become mental demigods. 3. The brain is not a system. It's some sort of metaphysical nonesense (I mean it literally doesn't make logical sense, it's mystical) and science will one day have to throw up its hands and give up on understanding it.
My money is on possibility one. If so, strong AI is definitely possible. In the worst case we simply copy the human brain directly, but I think it will be more flexible than that.
By the way, a similar argument can be extended to the entire universe. We haven't observed hypercomputation in nature at all and if we ever do we'll be able to exploit it.
If you know of an example of observed hypercomputation I'd love to hear about it. I want to build my own hypercomputer.
That doesn't make sense. You can't make a loan without money. Let's say I don't have $100,000 and I say I'll loan you $100,000 to start a business. When you go to the store to get supplies with this imaginary money then they will laugh at you.
If you somehow convince them that you're good for it and they give you the supplies then they've just loaned you $100,000 of real in-economy money in the form of supplies. Alternately, if you print $100,000 to buy those supplies with then you're stealing money from everyone's pockets via inflation.
Just because you got the money from somewhere non-obvious doesn't mean that money didn't exist as part of the total money in the economy before.
A huge problem with this is that there's no incentive to save. It's great for people to be investing extra and all, but they'll only ever be able to make small investments that they can afford from day to day and year to year. Only the wealthiest (and the government who is raking in the dough from the money they are printing) will be able to make larger investments that can pay off big time.
Additionally, if inflation gets bad enough then people will want to "invest" their money in ANYTHING else, regardless of how much long term sense it makes. So you end up with people buying non-productive things they don't need so they can use them while the getting is good or so they can barter with them (including some things that depreciate quickly). You also end up with people going into survival mode, living from day to day trying to survive now instead of thinking of the further future. This is also an accounting nightmare as most transactions become non-monetary. How do you tax refrigerators and chickens when they're worth tons of worthless money?
Lastly, outsiders won't want to deal with you anymore, so you get screwed when it comes to trade...which is nothing to scoff at.
Deflation isn't a bed of roses, but it's at least it's better than inflation. Hyper-deflation would completely ruin investment (why buy a factory at $1 million today when it will be worth $10 in a week and that $1 million would be worth $100 billion?) among other things. However, unlike hyperinflation there's no historical precedent for hyper-deflation...because creating hyper-deflation is hard. In the above scenario with the factory, a $10 trillion economy would have to slash its money supply down to $100 million to achieve that level of deflation. Realistically, no single actor will have the $9,999,900 million that has to be burned to achieve this. If the damage were spread out evenly then nobody would be making a profit by keeping money anyway (the government took $999,990 out of my $1 million, but hey now $1 million factories are $10, so there was no real change).
In other words, there's a pretty strict limit to deflation but not inflation. Inflation is only limited by how much abuse the users of the currency are willing to accept. Deflation is limited by how much money you have in the vault to shred up and throw away, which is much less extreme.
Hyper-deflation won't realistically happen, or if it does it will be very short term. However, slow stable deflation is possible and it isn't any worse than slow stable inflation (and maybe it's a little better). The slow depreciation of investments in monetary terms is counterbalanced by the fact that (real) investments make money which will also be more valuable. If anything, this slow depreciation makes it a bad idea to invest in "fake" investments that have high value but no productive element to them (for instance, owning an existing house is more clearly a liability in a deflationary economy). Admittedly there will be less investment, but it certainly won't be "economy-destroying"...and as a bonus any investments that do get made will be more productive.
Also, even this slower deflation can't keep up at the same rate forever. Eventually limits will be reached and things will level out...turning a deflationary currency into a stable one (with small fluctuations as time goes on). In the end, a stable currency is the best. You get none of the problems of either inflation or deflation. People will still want to invest because they can make more money than they already have, but at the same time they can trust their money and save up for big purchases and investments as their money won't lose value over time. It also helps in making the monetary system transparent...if you gain/lose value then it will be due to a real world gain/loss of value instead of some financial magic trick.
One last thing that needs to be noted: currency deflation is not the same as "deflation" caused by productivity gains or other such causes. Bread mainly dropped in price in the 19th century
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There was a 2000% uptick in talk about barriers designed to impound water.
I don't feel this is an accurate portrayal of libertarianism.
What you talk about is definitely a problem in anarchism. When there's no regulation of violence then the most powerful private actors will make the rules and the anarchistic system will vanish.
Under libertarianism though, the government exists and has license to exercise force on behalf of its citizens. The government does not have to be weak in the sense of physical strength. A libertarian government might have an impressive uniformed military force in addition to private armed militia. What sets a libertarian government apart is two things: 1. the government operates pretty much purely as an instrument of force (that is, it does not attempt to dictate morality or interfere in economic issues) 2. the government's charter is centered around preserving/maximizing personal freedom for all of the citizens of the nation over the long term (this mandate provides direction for the government instead of morality).
A libertarian government is obligated to act when the overall freedom of its citizenry is threatened by internal or external threats. This almost always means stepping on the freedoms of some of the individual citizens (perhaps taking away particularly destructive weapons from private actors, increasing taxes to maintain a larger standing military, or drafting citizens into the military service during a crisis). However, it is understood by libertarians that such violations of freedom will lead to greater overall freedom and is therefore worth it in the long run (if an expensive standing military and an inability to own my own nukes preserves my other freedoms, then so be it).
When a libertarian talks about "weak" government, what they're really talking about is a government that has a weak impact on its citizens daily lives (and therefore spends comparatively little so taxes can be low). In order for this to happen in practice, the government has to have its hands tied in many important areas (and therefore "weak" compared to more authoritarian governments), or else the human civil servants that compose the government will certainly abuse their power. For instance, if the government has unlimited power to lock up individuals without trial then such abuse will almost certainly occur (and the other citizens can't do anything about it because it's legal). However, if they are obligated by their own laws to release or try prisoners within a reasonably short time frame, then there is more hope that abuse will be minimized. That said, when a libertarian government is acting within its defined boundaries it can be extremely strong. If someone is about to detonate a nuke in a populated area, the government is not going to worry about that person's freedoms...they'll send in the military, because that person threatens the freedoms of many more individuals.
I consider myself libertarian (as defined above) but I lean slightly centrist in practice. The government is ultimately an apparatus of violence and I feel strongly that we should keep that isolated (otherwise we end up with the situation where people use the government's force to steal from other people, which is common in both non-democratic and democratic governments). However, I support several more centralist measures too. In particular I see disaster relief, investment in and maintenance of infrastructure, (limited) land conservation, and basic science funding as positive government intervention. A purely libertarian government would have no place for these measures, as they make economic and moral decisions that as the theory goes should be made by the market.
Oh, one last thing. Constant distraction is indeed a bad thing for deep thought, but this isn't really a difficult problem to solve. One simply needs to cut down on the distractions. Go somewhere quiet and unplug nearly all forms of communication. Only leave open one channel of communication (if that) and only give it to people who can be trusted to only contact you that way if it is truly important. For most people the world isn't going to stop because they're not there to keep it turning (or at the very least there are regular times in the day where your absence will not be critical).
There are some very important jobs that require you to be in constant connection with the rest of the world. If you get into one of those careers, don't expect to think deeply very much. If deep intellectual thought is important to you, then you should consider getting a different job. This is one of several reasons I gave up on a career as a system administrator.
The main problem with this idea (other than the fact that it is a paradoxically self-defeating idea) is that they are comparing modern popular culture with past intellectual culture.
Do they not remember a not so distant time when "nerd" and "geek" were insults in mainstream culture? Computer geeks only get any respect today because they make the wheels turn for everyone else. It's the same sort of respect a airplane pilot or train conductor gets.
My grandfather had to defy his father in order to graduate from high school because his father felt that much education was useless...the past is full of such stories that just get forgotten with the passage of time.
In any case, what this writer is observing is a sort of Jevons Paradox for information. As the efficiency of exchanging information electronically has increased, it has become more and more heavily used...and in particular it is being used for more and more things that would have not been worthwhile when efficiency was lower (and therefore the cost higher). As one might expect, most of the things that would not be worthwhile at a high cost are not particularly worthwhile. Usually it's because the information has little to no practical or intellectual value ("I'm eating a delicious sandwich"), but it can also be because the idea is unpolished and unready.
This second case really changes our perception of the emergence of world-changing ideas even in intellectual circles. In the olden days, a new idea would seemingly emerge fully formed from out of the blue. One day you open the paper and there's an article on this newfangled "airplane" thing that just made its first flight yesterday in North Carolina. Perhaps instead you walk into a bookstore and at the recommendation of one of your friends you pick up copy of this Nietzsche guy's book. For most consumers of ideas in this era, there's a clear dividing line between the world before the idea and the world after. However, for the originator of the idea there's not such a clear line. Big ideas have long private and semi-public histories before they reached their final public form. In the electronic age, we are more likely to be privy to this long history. When the big breakthrough happens we're much less likely to realize its importance, because its really just an incremental but important step up from what we knew before. In this way, even highly intelligent people can miss big changes as they occur. Instead, we usually notice years later...when we wake up one morning and HOLY SHIT THERE'S A ROBOT CLEANING MY FLOOR.
It'll be interesting to look back and see which big ideas stand the test of time. There's a good chance it will be the ideas of intellectuals that few people know about or take seriously today, like this guy: http://marshallbrain.com/ or this guy http://www.peoplescapitalism.org/
Those are some pretty big ideas if you ask me...
While this may be true, the biggest problem with using the Dragon capsule to carry human cargo at the moment is that it currently lacks an escape system. If the Falcon 9 lifting the capsule into orbit was to fail during launch, there's a good chance that it would result in horrible explosive death for the passenger. This isn't a minor risk either, several similar launch systems (Proton, Atlas IV) used for cargo launches have a roughly 90% success rate...meaning that our hypothetical passenger would have around a 10% chance of dying horribly. Now it may turn out that the Falcon 9 ends up with a much better record than such rockets...but at the moment it only has 2 launches under its belt, which is not nearly enough data to make a useful reliability estimate.
I dunno, but in English they nearly named it FART: Five-hundred-meter Aperture spherical Radio Telescope
How about adding a backup parachute system to the hoverbike itself? That is, it quickly ejects a parachute for the bike and rider when power is lost in the air. Since it's much lighter than a helicopter, it might work. I dunno.
A massive increase in available materials. Most of it is in our homes and workplaces.
Are you aware that as of 2008, 83% of the steel in the US was recycled?
As long as we have energy, it is possible to recycle everything else. Necessity is the mother of invention and a dwindling resource is worth more effort/energy to recycle and these same incentives will lead to better techniques for recycling that resource. Also, alternatives and previously uneconomical reserves will be tapped into.
Even energy isn't as big a problem as it might first appear. While it can't be recycled, there is plenty of energy to be tapped out there...
Actually, that's just their initial rationalization for gambling. Gambling is addictive because of variable ratio rewards.
Errr... yes it does. Or were you always a good driver / writer / programmer? Training is exactly the process of making someone good at something!
I may be a good programmer...but despite all my training I'm still not a good driver. I'm not bad enough to be a serious danger (no crashes yet), but when I compare my driving to that of my friends there's a world of difference.
I can't wait for robot cars.
I'm an atheist on the Internet but I hardly talk about God. Frankly, you don't have any evidence to back up your assertions...how do you tell that someone on the Internet is an atheist unless they're talking about their atheism? You can't unless you're reading something you know is written by someone who earlier identified themselves as an atheist, which probably means they're very passionate about their position...much more than your average person.
The point is that there are a lot more people who are more averagely passionate about certain topics that have a natural anti-group component than the visible leaders and internet trolls. You just don't hear these people's opinions because they're quiet about them most of the time.
Also, your "answer" is just a variation on the old-fashioned homophobe attack. If someone hates homosexuals, clearly it is because they secretly want gay sex...not because they are disgusted by gay sex or anything. That makes total sense, amirite? They may be wrong in hating homosexuals over something petty like that, but it does not follow that their hatred flows from a secret desire for gay sex. If this argument made sense, then you could say that free software advocates fight against proprietary software because they secretly want truckloads of money and tight control over the use of their software.
I have a mostly academic perspective of this debate.
Basically, the goal of process is to achieve high quality code at a low cost, or to put it another way the goal is to make development efficient. How this objective is achieved isn't really that important. Anyway, due to the massive complexity of a development team (member personality and interpersonal chemistry are complex affairs) and the plethora of different software objectives/metrics (nuclear plant safety software is measured mostly by lack of failures while social networking software is mostly measured in adoption rates), there's not really one right process.
However, just leaving it at that isn't very informative. It turns out there is one key element to process that everything good about process flows from...which is collecting data on what the developers are doing and taking the time to analyze that data to find areas where the process can be improved, leading to constant improvement in the efficiency of the process. Collect (Quantitative) Data -> Analyze Data -> Adjust Process -> Goto Collect Data.
Keep in mind that the data collection and improvement analysis are also part of the process. Collecting too much data (or the wrong kind of data) can be very detrimental as it takes time away from the developers doing real work to handle paperwork and constant navel gazing sucks up otherwise useful time. On the flip side of the coin, too little data collection will not allow you to construct an accurate picture of what's going on and good analysis of that data requires real time and effort...but this effort will pay off in the long run by making the real work more efficient for many years.
This process also takes some experimentation. "Let's try adding/dropping/modifying this practice and see what happens." "Oh, the data looks good after we implemented this, so let's continue to do it." "Hmm, this caused a slight decrease in performance due to time usage, I don't think it's worth it so lets drop it." It also takes some deeper thought. "Well, there was a slight negative impact in the short run, but this should have a positive long term impact, so lets hold out on judging it just yet." "This software is needed for a one-shot event, so we could drop all our long-term processes this one time to save effort." etc.
Existing processes and best practices are great places to look for ways to improve your process. "Code reviews have well known positive benefits across a wide range of situations, so we should incorporate that into our process." This really cuts down on the amount of experimentation needed to find a good process. However, following these suggestions blindly will lead to all sorts of trouble because as several other posters have mentioned it's a form of "cargo-cult engineering". One might adopt a practice that's good for high-quality high-cost systems when your goal is to make an acceptable-quality low-cost system quickly. One might adopt a practice that has a subtle negative effect, like driving away a good programmer or wasting small amounts of developer time for no benefit. If the boss is blind enough, they might even adopt a practice that completely destroys the team and project.
Constant analysis and review also helps reduce problems like valuable people leaving due to process. If they know the new practice they hate is only experimental and they'll be able to make a case against it at review time it makes it easier for them to tough it out for a while.
Once the process of continual improvement gets started, the team will constantly get better and better. Realistically there will be ups and downs, but the team will recover from the downs (such as a valuable person leaving), putting them at a nearly constant state of high efficiency...and the extra work put into maintaining and improving the process will be worth it.
Now of course there's more to good process than just striving to be in a state of constant improvement, but that would take far too long to talk about in depth. It includes things lik
That's a good follow-up question for that situation.
Also, thanks for the advice. I need to keep in mind that I'm shopping for the right employer as much as they are shopping for the right employee.
I think this is a good question, but I'm having a little bit of trouble answering it and I think this demonstrates a weakness of this particular question.
I'm a relatively new programmer, just out of college working at my first job. I have several past programming accomplishments that I could choose from, but I'm sort of ashamed of all of them. Why? I've been getting better and better as time goes on, so when I look back at my past work I'm extremely critical. My previous work sucked compared to my present work. That's not to say my past work wasn't valuable, as I had to work on these previous projects to learn what I know now. Also, my past work isn't objectively bad (or so I've heard from others). However, when asked this question I sit there and think about it for several minutes and eventually it becomes "what am I least ashamed of?" rather than "what am I proudest of?". I'm also tempted to answer with something like "getting through school" (which I am actually proud of due to all the hard work I put into it, and I see as programmer related)...but I bet this is one of the worst possible answers to give a recruiter.
I'm like an artist who has trouble putting together a portfolio because I want to sweep my entire learning process under the rug, but has little to no present work to stick in the portfolio. Even worse, anything I do now will probably end up being heavily criticized by my future self, putting me back in the same boat. I think it is likely that many skilled programmers that are just getting started have this issue, as programming is a creative endeavor and I see this all the time in other creative endeavors. It's sort of the inverse of the Dunning–Kruger effect...whereas the incompetent can't tell how awful their work is, the competent see all the itty-bitty problems in their work in gruesome detail. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
The weakness of this question is that it is not orthogonal. It is testing for skill, self-confidence, and a lack of perfectionism all at once. Unfortunately, slightly low self-confidence and a high degree of perfectionism can be positive attributes in a worker (as long as these attributes aren't so extreme as to be crippling). Too high a degree of self-confidence can lead to interpersonal conflict...or can lead to the situation where the person wastes a ton of time trying to do something themselves when it could have been easily resolved by talking to someone else. A degree of perfectionism prevents sloppy work being passed off as sufficient and leads to a constant drive for improvement (though of course it can also lead to irrational decisions about putting effort into something long after the law of diminishing returns kicks in).
It's still a good question, but you need to make sure that you account for people who would deal with this problem poorly precisely because they are skilled, otherwise you might let a gem slip through your hands.
Lack of shame is another problem that these unqualified employees display... or is lack of shame OUR perception? I know I would feel shame if I inserted myself into a situation where I was not qualified. But maybe that's just me and a bunch of other like-minded geeks here on slashdot. (Then again, when I insert my opinions here and someone with greater knowledge calls me an idiot, I don't often feel much shame... though some form of hate or anger results at times.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
I misunderstood your argument earlier. You're right that your proposed system is not necessarily stochastic, as you were using that as an interface between your free will and the physical world rather than proposing it was free will itself.
However, what I said earlier still stands. The idea you propose in this post is non-systematic (and if not, it must be deterministic or stochastic).
The main problem is the 'choice is made here' marker you mention. Planting that flag there and leaving it there is just giving up...the explanation for the marker is basically "MAGIC!". If we've isolated the decision making part of the system, why can't we study it? Let's assume we study it in depth and that we haven't missed any possible systematic explanations. Either we must have found a system that explains how it works (in a deterministic or stochastic way)...or there is no system that explains how it works and thus it is non-systematic. There is no other possibility! Since free will can't be constrained by a predictive system, true free will must be non-systematic if it exists at all.
Further, I don't think a consciousness that exists as a subcomponent would "understand" things. Understanding is a very high level mental property while consciousness is either an emergent property ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence ) or a very small subatomic thing. If consciousness is emergent (arising from the entire brain) then it understands what the brain understands because it basically is the brain. However, if it is a tiny choice-maker thingamajig that communicates through particle decay or whatever...then either it doesn't understand anything or it contains its own brain-like system inside of itself that can understand things (which gets into homunculus territory).
Here I actually have some evidence to back me up. Your consciousness only "understands" what your brain understands. Human experience clearly shows that messing with the brain also messes with your consciousness and its "understanding" of the world. One example is getting drunk. Among other things, it impairs your memory. Neuroscience has tracked down alcohol's effects on the GABA system as a prime suspect in this memory impairment. However, your consciousness is also affected as you have no memory and no direct understanding of the events that occurred while you were under the influence. How could this molecular-scale brain impact have an impact on a quantum-scale consciousness? It would be roughly like trying to split an atom using a hammer. Does getting drunk also impair your consciousness through some other channel? How?
Altered states of consciousness make a lot more sense when you look at consciousness from an emergent rather than an atomic perspective. The brain is affected, therefore your emergent consciousness is affected too. Therefore I think that consciousness is probably emergent. It's possible to make up other explanations that make sense, so I can't say this is true with certainty though.
I don't see why you're not impressed by Watson. Are you sure you understand how Watson works and the implications of Watson's success?
Let's assume for a moment that Watson is just a hyper-powerful chess computer. Watson can answer natural language general questions (posed in the form of a question) with a higher success rate than most humans. Does that mean that we're barely better than chess computers ourselves? What will these "chess computers" be able to do after 10 more years of hardware improvement?
Of course the reality is that Watson isn't just a chess computer. Watson's algorithms are much more powerful than the nearly brute-force approach of chess computers. That's not to say that Watson is on a human level...or that you could talk to Watson (as it lacks speech recognition)...or that Watson thinks anything like a human (does a submarine swim?)...but none of that matters. The point is that Watson can do very complex things that only humans could do before and it loo
I already handled your argument previously. The potential systems you propose are stochastic.
The problem is that such free will isn't really free. It is unpredictable, but in a merely random way. These particle decay-like events are essentially truly random dice rolls. It would be as though your life decisions were made by die rolls (well, more accurately die rolls filtered through layers of deterministic systems and possibly other stochastic systems, as there are clearly deterministic elements to our world's system).
In order for a person's free will to really be free, it can't be constrained by a system of prediction. Otherwise it's either a machine (deterministic) or a machine containing perfect dice as components (stochastic).
Consider your suggestion here:
Our consciousness for example might be in some way a non collapsed quantom state that reaches a decision and then acts by causing the decay of a particle.
How does our consciousness "reach a decision"?
You imply that this decision-making process comes about prior to the random decay. Is consciousness just a deeper system that is using a crummy signal to relay its desires to the wider world?
Really the interesting part of this proposal is the consciousness and its decision making process. Is it systematic? If so is it deterministic or stochastic? If we can come up with a scientific theory about how it works then it obliterates the illusion of free will that not understanding it creates. If we can't come up with such a theory then it's a non-understandable non-scientific phenomena.
As for cutting off avenues of exploration, that's a good thing as long as we know such avenues really are fruitless. For instance, it's good that we stopped exploring the notion of perpetual motion machines. Trying to tackle the perpetual motion problem will waste our efforts and never get us anywhere because it's impossible. It's better to use our efforts elsewhere. Furthermore, reducing the number of possibilities makes it easier to focus on the most fruitful ones. The whole world could potentially be explained with invisible magical leprechauns, but it would be tiring if at every scientific conference there was some guy who demanded to know if this new theory accounted for the leprechauns. So even possible avenues should be downgraded if they are unlikely...at least until someone makes a great case for that avenue.
Admittedly many of the deepest questions we have are almost complete mysteries. What is consciousness? What causes it? Why are we here instead of somewhere else? Why is consciousness persistent? Can we transfer it? I can't answer these questions, but I do know that their answers will either be systematic (and therefore not include free will) or non-systematic (and therefore non-scientific). My bet is on systematic and us just being extremely ignorant about such matters at the present day.
Finally, putting a time limit on strong AI is silly. Why? It's not a time based thing. AI researchers could all start twiddling their thumbs tomorrow and 20 years from now we will have made no progress in AI. Furthermore, strong AI is a grand project. It's not something that will come out of some kid's garage (at least at first). It will take a national-scale (or at least corporate-scale) effort many years to complete.
Probably the best thing to compare it to is permanently colonizing the Moon (or maybe Mars or something even further away depending on the difficulty). If the moon isn't colonized in 20 years then I suppose it'll never happen, right? /sarcasm The more effort we put into this project, the sooner it will be accomplished, but as we still don't have all the technology yet it's unknown exactly how many years it will take even if we give it our all. How will the moonies deal with living in low-G? How will they sustain themselves with food and air? How will they make replacement parts? How many people do we need to send to get a self sustaining population? How will we
You are drunk and it shows. It's probably a good idea to sleep it off and resume when you're sober.
I'd like to continue here on Slashdot as long as we can, but when the article gets archived I'll contact you at that address if we're still arguing. Don't worry about hurrying.
I'd like to point out here that you haven't really attempted to address my main argument about free will. If we can understand true free will then it is not really "free". Therefore it either must not exist or it must be a non-understandable phenomena (that is, non-scientific). Unless this argument can be overturned, those are the only two options. Tell me how understandable free will is possible.
A few things about what you said here:
Occam's razor is a rule of thumb, not a hard and fast rule. You can't prove anything with it. You can only suggest that one explanation is better than another equivalent explanation. In fact, all else being equal Occam's razor would generally support a free will-less explanation over a free will-full explanation...adding free will to the mix when things can be explained without it would generally increase the number of assumptions being made. Additionally, Ockham would probably be aghast at both of us, him being a medieval theologian and all.
What is meaning? How do things acquire meaning? Do things need to have meaning? These are very difficult philosophical questions and frankly it's hard to get people to agree on what a term like "meaning" means...
In my opinion, meaning is acquired through the relationships between things. Imagine a separate universe where there is nothing but a single muffin floating endlessly through an infinite expanse of empty space. This universe is largely devoid of meaning...the muffin doesn't have a story, it's always been there and always will be. There's no other objects for it to be near, and even the universe that contains it doesn't have edges for the muffin to run into eventually. Any given time frame will be essentially identical to all the others. Of course, by imagining this universe you are giving meaning to it by creating it in your head...but we should imagine that it wasn't created in our heads, but rather that it just exists out there on a lonely plane of existence for no reason.
However, take that same muffin and put it on my desk and suddenly it is dripping with meaning. It was baked a few hours ago by my mother for the purpose of delivering delicious delicious calories to my body so I can continue to live and write responses to online philosophical arguments (actually, I'm making this up, though I want a muffin now). All the energy and matter that went into the muffin had a backstory and will have a continuing story afterwards. It is related to everything in the whole universe at this very moment. The whole muffin vibrates with meaning as it moves towards fulfilling its purpose...a human-created purpose.
Actually, the really crazy thing is that it's impossible to avoid meaning. Even a completely empty lonely universe is related...to itself. This is where things get really maddening. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_loop
This argument has a point. I want to convince you and anyone else who reads it that free will is either non-understandable or false and that the brain is probably a Turing machine equivalent (and therefore AI is do-able using the same kind of technology we have today)...because I believe these things to be true at the moment and I'd like to hear other people's arguments so I can improve my own argument or even change my mind if I realize I'm wrong. It doesn't matter whether this came about due to me exercising my free will or due to me being predestined to do so, either way it is meaningful...it is not pointless.
As for my use of "not absolutely true", I mean it in the same way that Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation is "not absolutely true". It's not true, but it's close enough to the truth to be useful without the added complexity of
I don't believe in free will the same way you do. I do have a useful conception of free will, but it's not the same as yours.
The basic problem with your argument is that you are taking free will on faith. This is fine if you're willing to accept other things on faith, but you don't seem to be that kind of person.
Let's assume free will exists and that we can rationally analyze it (that is, it is a system). How could free will work?
Let's say that after years of study we have put together a scientific theory of free will. Well, we should be able to use this theory to make predictions about free will...but this defeats the purpose of free will doesn't it?
Now, it might be that this theory is stochastic so we can't absolutely determine what you will do next. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic However, is this really any better? Instead of your actions being determined by your current state, they are determined by your current state AND a random roll of the dice. You're still not really in control of your destiny...the random elements described in the theory are.
There's a contradiction here. Free will can't be both exist and be systematic. Therefore, one of those must be false...either there is no free will or free will is not systematic (and therefore not understandable by science, so it must be spiritual or something along those lines).
I'm not willing to give up on science so easily, so I believe that the answer is that true free will does not exist. Our actions are determined by the rules of the universe, our previous state, and possibly by random microscopic physical elements.
That said, free will is not a useless concept. There's two areas where it makes sense.
Free will is a useful conception for everyday life, even if it is not absolutely true. Think of it as a rule of thumb that works well while ignoring finer details. In particular, it helps one avoid developing an external locus of control. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locus_of_control This is important because one's decisions really do matter, even if they are pre-determined. A student who works hard to get good grades will generally benefit in the long run regardless of how they came to that decision. Someone who uses determinism to justify bad decisions is just looking for an excuse to avoid the consequences of their actions.
Additionally, free will rings true to some extent even in a completely deterministic system. There are four classes of computable deterministic systems: static, repetitive, chaotic, and complex. If human minds are deterministic then they are complex systems. An interesting property of complex systems is that they are incompressible. You can compress orderly systems into a simple mathematical form that determines their state at a given time absolutely. You can compress chaotic systems into a probabilistic form that determines their behavior at a high level. You cannot do that to a complex system. The only way to perfectly predict a complex system's behavior is to create an exact replica of it and watch what happens. So in a sense complex systems have "free will" because their behavior cannot be practically predicted beforehand. If you'd like to know more, look up Stephen Wolfram and his book. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_new_kind_of_science
It's true that not every system that is not a Turing machine is capable of hypercomputation, because lower classes of machine exist...as do "better" machines that end up falling into the same class as Turing machines (which includes things like present day quantum computers). However, these machines are all equivalent to a Turing machine due to the Church-Turing thesis. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church-turing_thesis (The "better" machines are just faster.) Therefore they are all capable of being run on computers...unless they involve hypercomputation or are not systematic at all.
Actually, going over the Church-Turing thesis article reminded me of three things:
1. It's possible that the Church-Turing thesis is wrong, as it is not a theorem but an extremely well supported hypothesis. In that case, my argument does indeed fall flat.
2. It looks like Penrose was arguing that our brains use hypercomputation, so he was taking this all into consideration.
3. It is mentioned that there could be possibly be systems that involve hypercomputation that we can't take advantage of. I doubt this is the case, but I suppose it is possible. However, if this is the case then it does not bode well for the brain being in a higher class than a computer, because it would be a hypercomputer in a universe where those aren't allowed.
I guess I should have posted this argument here instead, this thread is more popular :P
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2106768&cid=35956174
Essentially, if the brain is not a computer (or more accurately a system that could be run on a computer), then it is either capable of hypercomputation or not a system at all (magical).
Here's an argument in favor of the brain being a Turing machine (or lower class of machine):
1. Any system that is not a Turing machine or emulatable on a Turing machine will be capable of hypercomputation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercomputation and will therefore be capable of being fashioned into a hypercomputer.
2. A hypercomputer can solve undecidable problems such as the halting problem and almost certainly can solve any decidable problem in a tractable timeframe.
3. Despite millennia of observation, the brain has not been observed to be capable of hypercomputation, such as the above.
4. Therefore the brain is almost certainly a Turing machine (or lower class of machine, such as a DFA).
I see only three possibilities:
1. The brain is a Turing machine or lower class of machine.
2. In the future we will discover how to do hypercomputation with our brains and become mental demigods.
3. The brain is not a system. It's some sort of metaphysical nonesense (I mean it literally doesn't make logical sense, it's mystical) and science will one day have to throw up its hands and give up on understanding it.
My money is on possibility one. If so, strong AI is definitely possible. In the worst case we simply copy the human brain directly, but I think it will be more flexible than that.
By the way, a similar argument can be extended to the entire universe. We haven't observed hypercomputation in nature at all and if we ever do we'll be able to exploit it.
If you know of an example of observed hypercomputation I'd love to hear about it. I want to build my own hypercomputer.
Reminds me of this comic
http://dresdencodak.com/2011/04/19/dark-science-09/
That doesn't make sense. You can't make a loan without money. Let's say I don't have $100,000 and I say I'll loan you $100,000 to start a business. When you go to the store to get supplies with this imaginary money then they will laugh at you.
If you somehow convince them that you're good for it and they give you the supplies then they've just loaned you $100,000 of real in-economy money in the form of supplies. Alternately, if you print $100,000 to buy those supplies with then you're stealing money from everyone's pockets via inflation.
Just because you got the money from somewhere non-obvious doesn't mean that money didn't exist as part of the total money in the economy before.
A huge problem with this is that there's no incentive to save. It's great for people to be investing extra and all, but they'll only ever be able to make small investments that they can afford from day to day and year to year. Only the wealthiest (and the government who is raking in the dough from the money they are printing) will be able to make larger investments that can pay off big time.
Additionally, if inflation gets bad enough then people will want to "invest" their money in ANYTHING else, regardless of how much long term sense it makes. So you end up with people buying non-productive things they don't need so they can use them while the getting is good or so they can barter with them (including some things that depreciate quickly). You also end up with people going into survival mode, living from day to day trying to survive now instead of thinking of the further future. This is also an accounting nightmare as most transactions become non-monetary. How do you tax refrigerators and chickens when they're worth tons of worthless money?
Lastly, outsiders won't want to deal with you anymore, so you get screwed when it comes to trade...which is nothing to scoff at.
Deflation isn't a bed of roses, but it's at least it's better than inflation. Hyper-deflation would completely ruin investment (why buy a factory at $1 million today when it will be worth $10 in a week and that $1 million would be worth $100 billion?) among other things. However, unlike hyperinflation there's no historical precedent for hyper-deflation...because creating hyper-deflation is hard. In the above scenario with the factory, a $10 trillion economy would have to slash its money supply down to $100 million to achieve that level of deflation. Realistically, no single actor will have the $9,999,900 million that has to be burned to achieve this. If the damage were spread out evenly then nobody would be making a profit by keeping money anyway (the government took $999,990 out of my $1 million, but hey now $1 million factories are $10, so there was no real change).
In other words, there's a pretty strict limit to deflation but not inflation. Inflation is only limited by how much abuse the users of the currency are willing to accept. Deflation is limited by how much money you have in the vault to shred up and throw away, which is much less extreme.
Hyper-deflation won't realistically happen, or if it does it will be very short term. However, slow stable deflation is possible and it isn't any worse than slow stable inflation (and maybe it's a little better). The slow depreciation of investments in monetary terms is counterbalanced by the fact that (real) investments make money which will also be more valuable. If anything, this slow depreciation makes it a bad idea to invest in "fake" investments that have high value but no productive element to them (for instance, owning an existing house is more clearly a liability in a deflationary economy). Admittedly there will be less investment, but it certainly won't be "economy-destroying"...and as a bonus any investments that do get made will be more productive.
Also, even this slower deflation can't keep up at the same rate forever. Eventually limits will be reached and things will level out...turning a deflationary currency into a stable one (with small fluctuations as time goes on). In the end, a stable currency is the best. You get none of the problems of either inflation or deflation. People will still want to invest because they can make more money than they already have, but at the same time they can trust their money and save up for big purchases and investments as their money won't lose value over time. It also helps in making the monetary system transparent...if you gain/lose value then it will be due to a real world gain/loss of value instead of some financial magic trick.
One last thing that needs to be noted: currency deflation is not the same as "deflation" caused by productivity gains or other such causes. Bread mainly dropped in price in the 19th century