peanuts4life

@peanuts4life@beehaw.org

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nearly 11 million SSH servers vulnerable to new Terrapin attacks⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Unrelated rant: I am far less inclined to read articles with clearly ai generated images purely on the basis that every spammer with a braincell is leveraging it to shine up their turds. I wonder if this is just a me problem.

  PS, not saying this article is bad or something, just that I feel like ai generated images like this only add value if your audience doesn’t realize it’s ai generated. These ai ignorant people are probably not the target audience for this article.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is gravity instantaneous?⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  No.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Yes, We Have Free Will. No, We Absolutely Do Not⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t like the “There’s just stuff bumping into other stuff, and how is that free?” Argument. I feel like it’s unessisarily reductive.

  A stone washing down a river might be guided deterministically by fundimental forces, as are all of the actions of a human brain.

  However, the stone was dislodged by erosion. My will was set into motion by abstract human concepts. My memories, biases, emotions, education, habits, etc. these are not fundamental or physical forces. I was free, uninhibited by state or peers, to decide based on these internal factors.

  Sure, if you rewinded time and replayed it, I would always make that decision, and so would the stone wash down the river, but the human had a meaningful perception of free will.

  I would argue that free will is not a physical concept, but a phycological one. It succeeds in describing the experience of mulling over a decision, and freely acting upon it. It is fair and reasonable to say it, just like in my example it is fair and reasonable for me to say a terrible person is evil.

  If you twist the definition of free will contain some mention of subatomic autonomy, then sure, it doesn’t exist, but the concept predates such ideas…

  Heck, even the Bible- I’m an atheist- but the point of writing that God gave humans free will was the expression of the human experience. The writers wanted to explain why being a human FELT different from being a stone. They were grappling with the experience of consciousness in a spiritual way. The original text never claims to be the ultimate expression of physics. It’s reductive to dismiss the text as meaningless just because some later “free will” proponents claimed that the brain is quantum or whatever.

  Sorry, I agree with you about the nature of the universe. I just think these reductive debates are, in general, unproductive. I believe they misrepresent the subject from both sides.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Yes, We Have Free Will. No, We Absolutely Do Not⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Hmm. I disagree a bit with this idea, but more on the grounds of semantics. In a deterministic world, you might fret over a decision for weeks, taking influence from several factors. You are free to make any decision, and your will may be driven by rational desires.

  In this model, at an atomic level, you have no special, privileged position. A magical being with a perfect physical simulation could perfectly predict your actions in the same way as the movement of a falling stone.

  However, unlike a stone, your mind is tuned by all sorts of important human factors. Your memories, habits, biases, education, relationships, and perception. Just because they are the result of the same fundimental physical properties doesn’t mean they are suddenly devoid of meaning or random.

  Alternatively, if we imagine a world where the human mind is dependent on non physical, non deterministic factors. Does it actually change our previous hypothetical decision? Probably not. You’d still make a similar decision based on all of those human factors. Perhaps, this hypothetical non deterministic human might occasionally decide to “flip a coin” so to speak, and do something truly random, but to me that feels uninformed and uninteresting to my own experience. Few definitions of free will demand that we be able to make random decisions.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Yes, We Have Free Will. No, We Absolutely Do Not⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  I feel as if the answer to this is, by general consensus, yes. You have free will.

  Like, does Evil exist? Scientifically? No, absolutely not, but the word still has meaning. If I say, “that man is evil!” And you look at him and recognize his terribleness, then, sure: he is IS evil.

  Just because something isn’t objectively, physically quantifiable, doesn’t mean that it’s not a valid rational construct.

  I think the actual argument which has been making the rounds recently, is not, “do humans have free will?” But, Rather is, “are humans accountable for their actions, given that thier will is significantly biased by factors outside of their control / awareness?”

  It’s just that doesn’t get people’s attention.

  Ps, I believe that fundamentally, all physical interactions are deterministic in practice. Any conscious or rational being is fundamentally set in motion with the arrow of time, and if you could develop a fuzzy quantum state based intelligence, you’d only succeed in creating a person with slightly more random ideas. There would be no meaningful uplift in “free will.” However, I also Believe that this is an absurd deconstruction of heady topics. It’s akin to telling someone that a table doesn’t exist because it’s just a decomposing tree. Free will is a rational idea for human animals, and judged by that standard, fulfills it’s purpose in describing the experience of conscious decision making.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Japan TV network will acquire Totoro creator Studio Ghibli as animation studio prepares for future⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  I wonder if this is the best move for the younger staff.