After all, I know I like to think that I’m the only determinator in my choices, but that would ignore my thoughts on the current situation, the outcomes of similar choices made in the past, and what has happened to me recently.
Hand is to fingers as “I” is to “my thoughts on the current situation, the outcomes of similar choices made in the past, and what has happened to me recently”.
A hand has more to it than fingers, but still, the relation is whole to part, not inside to outside.
Sebastian:
How does this isolation work? Do you assume that the forces acting on the system from outside stay constant (in some undefined fashion), without explicitly modeling the outside?
That would save on computing power, yes. If you were playing a game against someone else, you would probably model yourself, the opponent, and “the hill plus the rest of the universe” but you wouldn’t actually think of the whole universe, just the parts that affected the hill. You would think of gravity but not Earth, and so on. If you think as though the whole goal is to save on computing power, and that the brain is actually fairly good at this (it has to be), then you won’t go far astray.
Wibby:
Hand is to fingers as “I” is to “my thoughts on the current situation, the outcomes of similar choices made in the past, and what has happened to me recently”.
A hand has more to it than fingers, but still, the relation is whole to part, not inside to outside.
Sebastian:
That would save on computing power, yes. If you were playing a game against someone else, you would probably model yourself, the opponent, and “the hill plus the rest of the universe” but you wouldn’t actually think of the whole universe, just the parts that affected the hill. You would think of gravity but not Earth, and so on. If you think as though the whole goal is to save on computing power, and that the brain is actually fairly good at this (it has to be), then you won’t go far astray.