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I was into a choose your own adventure books when I was a kid, there was one in particular that you are told in the beginning that there is a perfect ending but you can't get there by choice. There was no path in the book that got you to that page. You had to just decide to not follow the rules and turn to that page.
I think I remember that one, unless it's a reoccurring element in choose your own adventures. It was about ice cream and parallel universes or time travel or something right?
Had aliens in it. They were abducting sentients from all over to try to see if anyone knew how to get to space-paradise.
You need a starship to penetrate the barrier at the centre of the galaxy.
It's not the book that OOP was thinking of, but you're probably thinking of Meanwhile by Jason Shiga.
Yep, that's the one. Remember I picked it up in the library years ago because of the cover saying any path is correct. I remember If you open to the page not connected to anything it shows the main character riding a colossal squid with no context.
How would you know when to turn to that page though?
If it tells you at the start to turn to that page and you do, does it tell you the story from 80-90% of the way through? Or is it a totally new short story since you haven't started yet?
Because it was on like page 24 and you read page 23. So you knew it was there you just couldn't find a way to get there. Also the first sentence was something like "you figured it out!".
A moment of silence please for all the text in this image that's been mangled by JPEG compression.
Thank you.
F
To be unfunny:
The whole idea of a balls hitting each other universe went out the window when we hit the quantum era. We have had to adapt to a reality where matter is somehow a statistical phenomena, and the details are always hidden from us in one way or another. Entanglement is another confusing thing, and its super common - not just some rare phenomena in a lab, it's more of a fact of particle interaction
So our brains are somehow statisical-chemical-electric sugar powered supercomputers that have entangled state. And the brain actually stretches across the body, with various chemistry being produced throughout
In short, nobody has any idea how brains really work, it's way more elaborate than current AI. It's also likely impossible to fully simulate a brain - it would have to BE a brain
There's a separate question about the nature of randomness in the universe, but all we can know is that follows a normal distribution over time. It seems truly random from our point of view. Of course, who's to say if God likes to fudge the numbers a little
Yes, but none of that refutes the argument that we lack free will. The trillions of interactions leading up to an 'action' on our part can be random, determined, or some mixture - but they still 'cause' our next action, rather than our 'free will ' causing the action. If you believe in free will, you believe in a magical quality we possess which is somehow neither random (else it wouldnt be 'will') nor determined (else it wouldn't be 'free')
I personally find all discussion around free will annoying. Whether or not I have free will I still have to decide to do shit. I can’t just go on autopilot.
It only feels that way 😃 But yes, there's no escaping the feeling
Ridiculous, this is like some facebook post from my religious uncle. Brains are quantum entangled with the body? Bro you don't even know what that means or that information is not preserved in entanglement
I almost want to ask for a source but I shutter to think what might be dredged up
What? Every chemical reaction within every neuron is still governed by physics. Just because we don't understand how the physics works doesn't mean we get to throw physics out the window. Even then, even if we ignore the physical aspect of it, from a philosophical standpoint, you can easily argue that free will doesn't exist.
Let's say for a moment that I'm wanting to go get dinner somewhere, and as I'm walking there, I start to cross a street and get hit by a bus. I wake up and Death is laughing. Wiping tears from his eyes he says, "man, that'll never get old. Listen, I'll give you a second chance. I'll rewind time to the moment before you decided to cross the street without looking, and if you make it across, I'll leave you alone." I take the offer (who wouldn't), and time gets rewound. I'm now standing at the curb, getting ready to cross the street, with no memory of the events that transpired after I stepped off the curb. Will I try to cross the street again, or will I decide not to?
spoiler
The answer is that I'll cross the street again. Why? Time got rewound. I don't remember getting hit by the bus, nor do I remember talking to death. There's no reason for me to avoid the street because I have the exact same information I had the last time, so there's no way for me to come to a different conclusion about which path I should take. I wake up and Death is laughing.
Edit: how the fuck do spoilers work? They don't show up on liftoff
Looking past the technobabble...
The implications of quantum mechanics just reframes what it means to not have free will.
In classical physics, given the exact same setup you make the exact same choice every time.
In Quantum mechanics, given the same exact setup, you make the same choice some percentage of the time.
One is you being an automaton while the other is you being a flipped coin. Neither of those really feel like free will.
Except.
We are looking at this through a kind of implied metaphor that the brain is some mechanism, separate from "us" that we are forced to think "through'. That the mechanisms of the brain are somehow distorting or restricting what the underlying self can do.
But there is no deeper "self". We are the brain. We are the chemical cascade bouncing around through the neurons. We are the kinetic billiard balls of classical physics and the probability curves of quantum mechanics. It doesn't matter if the universe is deterministic and we would always have the same response to the same input or if it's statistical and we just have a baked "likelihood" of that response.
The way we respond or the biases that inform that likelihood is still us making a choice, because we are that underlying mechanism. Whether it's deterministic or not it's just an implementation detail of free will, not a counterargument.
Cool so you have awareness of and/or control over the quantum particles that make up the baryons that make up the matter of your brain? No? Then you don't have free will.
Even just from a biological perspective the idea of free will is iffy.
Any decision you make today is influenced by a chain of decisions going back to the beginning of all decision making. Everything from what you had for breakfast to what your great grandfather had for breakfast to what tiktaalik had for breakfast has affected your own individual biology and internal chemistry to lead you to any choice you're about to make. Even locally there's so much going on in our bodies that we're not aware of and don't have control over and which are influenced by things we don't have control over that directs our daily lives in profound and complex ways.
The eminent Robert Sapolsky is able to put this idea into better terms than I am if anyone wants to peek into this area further.
From all the discussions I've read about Free Will, I'm convinced the term actually doesn't mean anything at all. What would a world with free will look like? What would a world without free will look like? How would a person with/without it behave? Would there be any tangible difference between them?
As far as I can tell, free will is supposed to be a property of a person, which may or may not have something to do with physics, either everybody has it or nobody has it, and nobody has a definition that would let them measure it (without reducing the question to a disagreement over semantics). I think that whether someone believes in free will is a trick question; you can't believe or disbelieve in a something that isn't even a real concept to begin with.
It's like the "are we living in a simulation" question. It's impossible to prove or disprove and ultimately does not affect our lives in any way that we can control. Just a thought experiment.
It may be possible to prove if one day we can prove whether universe is or isn't deterministic.
It can in theory be disproved - if we ever manage to prove that universe is deterministic, free will by definition cannot exist.
What is this from?
Gave me a chuckle.
Sam Harris and Jay Garfield have a great podcast about free will. Saint Augustine came up with the idea of free agency in order to get God off the hook for Eve's fall. Fascinating stuff.
Sam's explanation of free will is compelling and difficult to argue against. The way we feel about it reveals something about us. He cites examples of people who found comfort in the idea of an absence of free will but also people who are terrified of the idea. Meanwhile, the universe hasn't apparently changed. The more I think about this stuff, the more I come to believe that we construct the world in our imaginations and fit the data to that model, not the other way round. We see what we want to see.
There's also a third group of people who find the absence of free will neither comforting nor terrifying, but just don't give a fuck. The absence of free will is just a simple fact, and it doesn't have any impact on my life whatsoever. I'm still doing what I was always gonna do and my brain will still produce the feeling that I'm in control of myself and my life, just like everyone else. I don't understand what there is to even have feelings about on the matter.
turns to page 73
A team has been dispatched to your location.
Oooooo You cannot go against nature Because when you do (Go against nature) It’s part of nature too
Slams book shut in disgust
When I first played Life Is Strange I already knew about the choice at the end, but without context it didn't really mean much to me. I thought that over the course of the game I'd come to prefer one option over the other.
By the time the final mission started I was still very much on the fence, so I went and choose the third option: Closing the game and leaving it's characters in a limbo of uncertainty
Pretty sure that "free will" is just our monkey brains attempting to rationalize what we mostly do based on instincts.
For anyone who's skeptical about 'free will' being illusion, please read consider this book "Free Will" by Sam Harris, it will change allot.
Edit: there is another one, "Predictably Irrational". This does not deal with the matter directly but can help developing a opinion on the matter.