I decided LessWrong would be more impressive to me with a particular, well-defined change.
So, um, what was that change?
Your description of the “free-will machine” doesn’t make much sense to me. What does it mean to “set the probabilities on the various possible quantum outcomes”? What is this “fundamental law of probability” of which you speak? In what possible sense does the output of your machine “not have a probability”? I think what you’re getting at may be: it’s a machine that looks at all possible computable probability distributions over its outputs, and arranges by some kind of diagonalization procedure to behave in a way that doesn’t fit any of them. But then the fact that this thing isn’t (according to the laws of physics as currently understood) actually implementable is a fundamental obstacle to what you’re trying to do. Actual things you can make in the actual world produce (so far as we know) behaviour with computable probabilities. Impossible things might not; who cares? Finite truncations of your “free-will machine” simply fail to have the probability-defying behaviour you’re ascribing to the infinite version.
So, um, what was that change?
Your description of the “free-will machine” doesn’t make much sense to me. What does it mean to “set the probabilities on the various possible quantum outcomes”? What is this “fundamental law of probability” of which you speak? In what possible sense does the output of your machine “not have a probability”? I think what you’re getting at may be: it’s a machine that looks at all possible computable probability distributions over its outputs, and arranges by some kind of diagonalization procedure to behave in a way that doesn’t fit any of them. But then the fact that this thing isn’t (according to the laws of physics as currently understood) actually implementable is a fundamental obstacle to what you’re trying to do. Actual things you can make in the actual world produce (so far as we know) behaviour with computable probabilities. Impossible things might not; who cares? Finite truncations of your “free-will machine” simply fail to have the probability-defying behaviour you’re ascribing to the infinite version.