[drybjed]

Jacek Dukaj in his book "Perfect Imperfection" (Polish hard sci-fi about alternative physics, mind uploading and enclosed universes) wrote about entities vastly superior to human-level intelligence having an ability to simulate humans to such a degree of precision that they were able to determine what a given human would say or do based on his own internal experience and knowledge in real time. The superintelligent beings didn't scan his brain patterns, they just had multiple simulations of him and chose the one that would best match his actions based only on external cues like position of his hands, body language, speech patterns, etc.

A solution to avoid being read to such a degree that your free will effectively is destroyed was to introduce randomness as a program in your own mind processed in an equivalent of a "cloud VM" - random changes in your body posture, hand movements, weird phrases introduced while you spoke could confuse the internal models of you enough to avoid hyper-predictability.

[lioeters]

That's really good, I'll have to read some of his work (Jacek Dukaj). It makes me think about the role of indeterminacy and unpredictability in physics. And reminds me of..who was it, Gurdjieff maybe, who taught that humans are like sleeping machines, and that constant conscious effort is necessary to "stay awake". Many of his exercises for students had the purpose of recognizing one's own habits, routine patterns of thinking and behaving, and breaking out of them.

The sci-fi story also reminds me of, I think it was related to Karl Popper's book about "objective knowledge". There was a thought experiment about Mozart, if a scientist could quantify everything external about the composer, like the brain, the body, the room he's in, his life experiences - is it possible to deterministically compose new works exactly as the real Mozart would. And if not, what is the difference between the perfectly simulated Mozart and the real one?

This "randomness" is related to the ancient Greek concept of clinamen.

> Clinamen, derived from clinare, to incline: the unpredictable swerve of atoms in the atomistic doctrine of Epicurus. This swerving, according to Lucretius, provides the "free will which living things throughout the world have".