[ted_bunny]

Hard to paramtereize a relationship when we can't confidently define either member of it.

Personally, I think it's utterly silly to think that free will fits into a material model. If it's real, I'd sooner believe in a panpsychist universe than a magical meat computer that shifts reality at will. The Quantum Indeterminacy argument is God in the Gaps.

[JoshCole]

> I think it's utterly silly to think that free will fits into a material model.

It isn't silly, but it is hard to discuss it with people because logic breaks down under self-reference and logical debate has been the most popular mode of our debates since Aristotle. Even empiricism doesn't save from this weakness, because it implies we ought to update based on the observed evidence. The Halting Problem and the Incompleteness Theorems are very important to recognize. They lead to a recognition of the infinite self-reference that occurs quite naturally as physics reaches its limit and is employed to model an agent which uses that model to model another agent that is modeling them. This produces computationally irreducible phenomenon. From there we start to reach into game theoretic concerns wherein evidence denial on the basis of equilibrium consideration becomes normal. When extended to imperfect information settings we end up discovering that non-deterministic policies are optimal. This optimality proof and the guarantee of the ability to confound through undecidability give us a grip on what selection and variation ought to select for through an appeal to the central limit theorem.

The funniest thing to me is that the decision to deny this corresponds with choosing an unfactored and unsimplified representation for reality as being more correct. Yet this backfires in the most beautiful way: it is slower to compute then the factored and simpler representation. Which means it is computationally reducible. Which means other agents can know your output before you do. Which makes you victim to Halting Problem attacks - or rather it makes you determined but your world indeterminable for you. But the even more amusing irony is that the entire reason we even use logic and empiricism is because we recognize the proxy relationship advantage as a function of the proxy not being the actual thing. So it is a self-refuting position, because it tries to reject the underlying motive for both the use of logic and the use of evidence. Which, well, when you see it - now that is rather silly!

What it is on the free will side isn't silly, but non-sense. As in, literally non-sensory. When you really realize that is what is happening though it is a mistake to laugh at it. After all, how many fingers am I holding up right now? You aren't sensing it. Non-sense as a belief about your sensory data is actually quite valid, because you aren't sensing it actually corresponds to your actual states. It is congruent, not in-congruent, with relevant states.

In formal reasoning about this topic we therefore differentiate between three things: world state, observation state, and information state. This is starting to get into the game theory aspects of the problem, which can end up being very motivating when you notice the proof of optimality of non-deterministic policy functions under imperfect information, but if you really want to understand the undecidability you probably are better off checking out something like https://www.wolframscience.com/nks/p750--the-phenomenon-of-f...

[ted_bunny]

Care to dumb this down? I have no clue what you're trying to say here.

[JoshCole]

Another attempt at dumbing it down:

We sometimes don't know what will happen until it does. The best we can do is to make a guess. Sometimes this guess will be very often good, but it is still a guess and we need to be open to the idea that our guess was wrong in some aspects.

Suppose we could have a perfect guess though.

We can use the guess to figure out what would happen and it would always work. Okay, lets use it to determine what happens in the future in which we use it to determine what happens. Do you see the issue here? The guess references itself. So it can't predict the future in advance of it. There comes a point where it is looping and giving you the leading edge of what is knowable given the amount of time that has passed so far.

So we don't have the perfect guess, even when we have the perfect guess. We don't know what will happen before it happens, even if we know the rules that tell us what happens before they happen.

There are a bunch of wierd things that get implied by the math that is consequent to this, especially when you get into transpositional structures, but it isn't silly so much as it is non-sensory.

I mean, it does sound laughable. When Feynman said we guess when we do science and then validate the guesses with experiments people did laugh. Yet this is not because it is silly. It is because the non-sensory cases we can't differentiate from can only be differentiated from the sensory cases via the experiment.

What often happens though is that directly after the moment people pretend that it was all known before hand. It is a tricky moment, the present.

[JoshCole]

For some calculations you can make them simpler and do them faster, but for other calculations you can't. When two things that try to predict things by making things simpler apply themselves to predicting each other... well.

In order to think about this sensibly you have to think through the consequences of the infinite self-reference. Logic fails here. So does evidence. For example if you observe that your opponent is playing badly, modeling them as a bad player doesn't work, because if you choose to do this, they could exploit the bad model by playing better than that model would predict. So even though the evidence suggests that they are a bad player, the self-reference considerations forces you away from acting as if they actually are.

So lets say you play rock? They play paper. Lets say you play scissors? They play rock. Lets say you play paper. They play scissors.

Lets say you fully determine everything they are going to do using your complete knowledge of physics and you play rock because your model told you that they would play scissors... They will play paper; obviously.

Lets say you anticipate that and you play scissors. Then they play rock. As long as you claim that you can figure everything out, it means they could figure everything out. The harder you push against this, the harder it pushes back. You have to move with the force, diverting it, not fight against it. You've got to take advantage of the inevitability of being unable to overpower, not try to overpower. You have to act as if you can do everything at once, because the undecidability allows you to do so. Not try to determine everything, because if you try to, then you can't, because others try to do the same thing.