Well, the question is whether our thoughts are deterministic or not. If you reset the universe to the same point multiple times, would everyone necessarily do exactly the same things? Or might there be variation? There being an extra-universal influence on our thoughts that wouldn’t get reset gives the possibility of non-determinism, even if there is some ability to predict what it might do in known circumstances.
Actually running that test though would be… difficult. We only get to see one of the runs, so we have nothing to compare to.
So is our sense of free will an illusion? Or meta-information that’s leaking in from somewhere due to incomplete sandboxing? Really hard to know for sure. But, at the same time, does it actually matter?
tlhonmey
Karma: 81
Thing is, there are quite a few questions about our universe which simply cannot be definitively answered using only information from within our universe.
Take “free will” for example. Does our thinking arise entirely from natural phenomenon, or is there some extra-universal component to it? Well, if it is the latter, then the only way for us to find out from inside the universe is if the universe is built in a way to make it obvious. If there’s some discontinuity between cause and effect with regard to thinking or similar.
But if there is a supernatural influence on our thinking, why the heck would it be bound by our limited perception of the time dimension? It’s outside every normal dimension except time? The characters in a novel, if they start trying to examine whether or not they have “free will”, find exactly what the author wishes them to. And it will be as perfectly consistent as the author cares to make it. You can only break out of the sandbox if there’s a flaw in the sandbox, deliberate or otherwise.
“Simple models” are good. Using the simplest model that produces accurate predictions reduces mistakes and confusion. But the model is not the universe, and the apparent simplicity could be an entirely local phenomenon.
Why? If the answer is “no” then applying a proper punishment causes the nebulous whatsit in charge of the person’s free will to change their future behaviour.
If the answer is “yes” then applying a proper punishment adjusts the programming of their brain in a way that will change their future behaviour.
The only way a “yes” makes it harder to justify punishing someone is if you overexpand a lack of “free will” to imply “incapable of learning”.
As far as we know, there has been not one single violation of conservation of momentum from the uttermost dawn of time up until now.
And because we know that, any unusual reports that would seem to imply such a violation may have happened are obviously false… Ties up the loose ends.
The chemical stuff could be explained by alterations to thermal expansion. Less expansion would cause less pressure, and spiking pressure is a critical part of getting an actual detonation. Would also reduce the amount of wind though, so the climate would possibly change substantially.
Electronic stuff failing is rather more difficult to figure out without wrecking people’s brains, compasses, etc. He probably should have left that alone and just let the electronics fade away since without gas expansion generating electricity to run them would be impractically expensive.
It may well be a “tightly-laced reality”. It’s just not this one. Perhaps the answer to a match not working in the world the hero is transported to is that the fundamental chemistry of the universe is different and our protagonist’s body has obviously been modified to match. Or else the difference is some specific alteration where human metabolism can still work, and yet phosphorous can’t generate a high enough temperature to ignite cellulose. The fact that he still has a match after transportation to such a different world where probably only his mental pattern is actually making the jump is the harder part to explain.
Similarly it might be possible to create a world where firearms and engines don’t work by changing how much effect temperature has on the expansion of gasses without wrecking other things too terribly much.
But… we’re talking about fantasy, not hard sci-fi… It’s about the people, not the specifics of the physics of the universe.
If you interpret it strictly, an answer of “yes” puts you in the space of “I used to beat my wife, but I have stopped.” An answer of “no” puts you in the ambiguous space of “Either I used to beat her, and I still do, or I never have and therefore can’t have stopped.”
The question is which of those two possibilities people will assume. Which will depend on the context and what they already think of both you and the person asking.
There are quite a few ways it can go wrong other than just central planning. Ultimately most of them come back to some special interest group attempting to forcibly subvert the economy to favor their own preferences.
High extraction ratios aren’t inherently problematic economically speaking since it’s not like the extracted resources simply vanish, and market forces tend to bring the extraction ratio down over time until it reaches the lowest level anyone’s willing to do the job for. But, high extraction ratios do make a tempting target for non-economic actions designed to preserve the lucrative ratio against the actions of the market.
From the economics side of things, individual nodes having massive amounts of locally useful information, but it being very difficult to determine exactly which pieces of that information are globally relevant and it being completely impractical to ship and process every piece of that information at the global level is the fundamental problem that most “command economies” tend to run into.
I’m afraid I haven’t collected a definite list. I just notice when it pops up in the wide variety of materials I tend to read. For example, traffic studies showing better flow rates and safety when drivers are allowed more individual discretion. You’ll probably also find some stuff in Austrian economics with regard to how more freedom of choice allows for better optimization by making fuller use of the processing capability of each individual. And there have been a few references to it in business management studies about why micromanaging your employees almost invariably leads to worse productivity.
“Network Effects” is probably a good keyword if you want to go looking for such examples specifically. It seems to be a common phrase.
Such a low-ranking solution as “Everyone have as many kids as possible, then cannibalize the girls” would not be generated in your search process.
Like… “A Modest Proposal”? I would suggest that low-ranking solutions are very often generated and are simply discarded without comment in the vast majority of cases. The only way “efficiency” enters into it comes from the way we start our search for solutions by considering how to adapt already known solutions to similar problems.
This does, in fact, show up in evolution as well. Adapting existing solutions is far more common than inventing something entirely new. Like how the giraffe has the same number of cervical vertebra as (so far as I know) every other four-legged mammal on the planet.
Try “The Two Faces of Tomorrow”, by James P. Hogan. Fictional evidence, to be sure, but well thought out fiction that demonstrates the problem well.
Personally I think I actually tend to anthropomorphize more as a result of my ability to guess what others are thinking being learned rather than instinctive. Because I really am using the same circuitry for comprehending people as I do for comprehending car engines and computers and using it in essentially the same way.
But I may not be typical. Best guess is that my particular quirks are mostly the result of a childhood head injury rather than anything genetic.
A lot of the things that ancient cultures attributed to God are this kind of thinking.
If you see a dead pig on the side of the road with no signs of violence, stay the heck away from it. You don’t have to know which specific disease it died of, or even what a disease is. People have just noticed that anyone who goes near such a thing tends to die horribly later and maybe takes half the tribe with them. The precise intermediate steps are largely irrelevant, just the statistical correlation.
There are two failure modes to watch out for.
The first is when people start worshiping their own ignorance and refuse to update the rules as their understanding of the underlying principles improves.
The second is when people recognize that the idea of “God” as an old man with a long beard who lives in the clouds is patently ridiculous and assume therefore that all of the principles and rules intended to “stay his wrath” may be ignored with utter impunity.
To the first type I generally point out that whatever creator they believe exists gave us our intelligence as well, and refusing to use that gift to the utmost would be an insult.
To the second I like to suggest that, since “Thor” is imaginary, maybe they should go stand in an open field and wave a metal stick around during the next thunderstorm… A “primitive” understanding of something is not the same as being stupid, and a few thousand years of experience that says, “If you do X, bad things happen,” should not be ignored lightly.
If there weren’t people who had a strong desire, not just for sex, but to actually have a child, and a willingness to go to extreme measures to do so, then sperm banks wouldn’t be a thing.
Given the number of people who specifically, and openly desire to make babies, postulating a subconscious desire that might push them to “forget” their contraception isn’t unreasonable. Especially given that cycle timing and coitus interruptus have been staples of human sexual behaviour since… Well… At least as far back as we have any records about such things. Dawn of civilization.
The two sets of replicators reminds me of an article I read about a species of birds that seems to be splitting into effectively four sexes. Male and female, but then also coloring patterns that have formed a stable loop that alternates back and forth. If the loop were unstable they’d split into two species, but it alternates generations regularly, so they keep mixing, but in a pattern of four.
Alternatively, consider the various sects in history which have thought that the world was evil and therefore bringing children into it was doing them great harm. Needless to say, the majority of them seem to have died out...
I would submit that most other species on the planet, were they to rise to our level of intelligence, would not bother inventing condoms. In most other species, the females generally have no particular interest in sex unless they want babies.
Humans though, are weird. Because of our long phase of immaturity, and the massive amount of work involved in raising a child, we need really strong social bonds. Evolution, being a big fan of “The first thing I stumble across that gets the job done is the solution” repurposed sex into a pair-bonding trigger, and then, as our ancestors’ offspring required longer and longer care, divorced it from any specific attempt to make a baby at that particular moment.
Now fast forward to the point where infant mortality drops and churning out babies as fast as possible is no longer the best strategy. But we still need the pair bonding because the length of childhood hasn’t gotten any shorter, and it still goes way better with two sets of hands to look after the little one. Evolution would probably come up with another quick hack for this… (One might suggest that it already has in the form of oral sex.) But it will take a while. Our brains are faster.
Evolution now will simply need to favor genetics that introduce an explicit desire for children, rather than the other behaviours which used to inevitably lead to them. Which… There are a lot of people out there for whom not wanting children is a dealbreaker when looking for a potential spouse. So it seems like it’s already on top of that one too.
Personally I think the Inquisitor has a much better case than the Phlogiston theorist.
If humans have an immortal soul, then saving that soul from an eternity of torment would easily justify nearly anything temporarily inflicted on the mortal body in the same manner that saving someone’s life from a burst appendix justifies slicing open their belly. While brutal, the Inquisitor is self-consistent. Or, at least, he could be.
Magnesium gaining weight when burned, however, has to be special-cased away to fit with Phlogiston theory. There aren’t really any coherent explanations for it that don’t boil down to “Magnesium doesn’t count.”
Still, it’s a good example of the lengths to which people will go to justify their own preferred courses of action. The Inquisition was, after all, largely political rather than religious, concerned with rooting the last of the Moorish sympathizers out of Spain.
Reminds me of one of the early AI research projects using some variety of optimization algorithm to try to “learn” the ability to solve a wide variety of problems in a single program. Genetic algorithm I think, random mutation and cross-pollination of the programs between the best performers, that kind of thing.
After a while, they noticed that one of the lines that had developed, while not the best at any of the test problems, was second-best at all of them.
Yet when they tried to make it the base of all their next generation… it didn’t work...
Cue a massive analysis effort to rip it apart at the machine-code level and figure out what the heck was going on. Eventually they found that it had stumbled upon a security flaw in their running environment and learned to steal answers from the other programs running on the system.
Evolution doesn’t care if it’s cheating, only if it works.
There are indeed multiple ways it could work. And it may be tough to decide how to draw any boundaries. Is it some totally separate realm that only interacts with ours in the one area? Or is it something that’s simply a little outside of the four dimensions we can normally perceive and it’s tied in everywhere in subtle ways and our cognition is merely the only spot where we easily notice it? We might try to model it in a number of different ways depending on exactly what we find. But we’re almost certainly going to have problems trying to fully understand something so different from what our brains are built to work with, especially when getting into things like this where it’s definitely possible that attempting to understand it could have a feedback loop with how we think at a fundamental level.
And I can’t really think of a way that we could know for sure if our universe is deterministic or not. You’d have to be able to see multiple runs of it and observe if they were identical or not… It’s kind of like the theoretically O(1) “randomize data, check if sorted, if not then destroy the universe” sort algorithm...