In any moment, you have literally millions of options.
Has anyone actually made an attempt to calculate possible degrees of freedom for a human being at any instant? There are >millions of websites that could be brought up in those tabs alone.
There are literally infinite depending on how you want to define it—I could go to google and search any number I want, up to a googul at least. And if I decide to do it a fraction of a second later, that’s another googul options. And that’s just typing things in on google.
There are a few ways to look at the question, but by my reasoning, none of them result in the answer “literally infinite.”
From a deterministic point of view, the answer is zero degrees of freedom, because whatever choice the human “makes” is the only possible choice he/she could be making.
From the perspective of treating decision-making as a black box which issues commands to the body, the amount of commands that the body can physically comply with is limited. Humans only have a certain, finite quantity of nerve cells to issue these commands with and through. Therefore, the set of commands that can be sent through these nerves at any given time must also be finite.
True, without a source of randomness there are technically finite states that a human brain can decide on. So I suppose it’s not literally infinite, but it still gets us to 2^(number of neurons in a brain), which is many more states than a human brain could experience in the lifetime of the universe. Of course, many of those states are fundamentally broken and would just look like a seizure, so perhaps all of those should be reduced together.
Has anyone actually made an attempt to calculate possible degrees of freedom for a human being at any instant? There are >millions of websites that could be brought up in those tabs alone.
There are literally infinite depending on how you want to define it—I could go to google and search any number I want, up to a googul at least. And if I decide to do it a fraction of a second later, that’s another googul options. And that’s just typing things in on google.
There are a few ways to look at the question, but by my reasoning, none of them result in the answer “literally infinite.”
From a deterministic point of view, the answer is zero degrees of freedom, because whatever choice the human “makes” is the only possible choice he/she could be making.
From the perspective of treating decision-making as a black box which issues commands to the body, the amount of commands that the body can physically comply with is limited. Humans only have a certain, finite quantity of nerve cells to issue these commands with and through. Therefore, the set of commands that can be sent through these nerves at any given time must also be finite.
True, without a source of randomness there are technically finite states that a human brain can decide on. So I suppose it’s not literally infinite, but it still gets us to 2^(number of neurons in a brain), which is many more states than a human brain could experience in the lifetime of the universe. Of course, many of those states are fundamentally broken and would just look like a seizure, so perhaps all of those should be reduced together.