(1) Am I a decider - no - I am a pattern unfolding according to it own design - fractal in form and movement - accordingly I don't have to decide anything. (2) can I model... - yes - the sociomonics institute demonstrates this capability quite well - patterns are capable of being modeled. (3) Can I predict ... - yes - patterns generally follow predictable courses - consider what you do (individually or collectively) when you are happy vs unhappy as an example and also people's habits take the pain out of having to make decisions lol - The halting problem points to endless uncertainty in deciding due to the assumption that people make decsions logically by considering pros and cons. However, in my experience, decisions are made at the drop of a hat and the logic is usually wrapped around it as an after thought because people like the idea that there is always a reason for what was decided. Wonderful lecture thank you.
Sense of Free Will has nothing to with my inability to predict my own behaviour. Just the opposite. A moment ago I predicted I would post this comment. Posting this comment affirms my Free Will. As John Searle said regarding Free Will: I choose to raise my arm and my arm raises. That’s Free Will.
Wouldn't the test be able to _predict_ a split second before you're aware because it takes time for those signals to register in your brain? So your internal self made the decision and now your external self is waiting for that signal but the machine _knows_ what you decided on (based on past data) before that signal is registered and you become consciously aware of it
The question of free will does not hinge upon whether a system is able to predict its own decisions, but whether a system may at any point possess capability to make a decision with a measure of freedom from prior, external causes. Proponents of free will are not necessarily proponents of fortune telling. Even if a system does have the ability to predict its own behavior, this would be entirely unrelated to the question whether or not that future behavior was self-chosen or not.
Free will does require that the future being undetermined, so it is definitely not un-related. Decisions cannot ever be completely self-chosen, because everything in the universe is causally connected. If I can know the state of all the information in the universe at the present, and use that to theoretically predict it's state at any point in the future, then it can be argued that we do not have free will. Seth is arguing that, in a closed system (like the universe), the future is physically impossible to predict.
@@geoffreytylerpayne Determinism axiomatically asserts that every action is completely determined by a set of prior causes. This is not known to be true; it is merely taken to be true, a priori, by determinists. As you mentioned, this conjecture cannot even be tested. But if the assertion is true, then Determinism is true; if false, then Determinism is false. So when determinists propose that IF all relevant variables could be known, and IF they could could be plugged into the right (yet to be discovered) algorithm, then the resulting behavior would always be calculable, they are merely rephrasing the definition of determinism. It is nothing more than mere, unfalsifiable belief. But all of this is a completely different question than whether it is possible to equip a system with self-referential foreknowledge of its own behavior. Laying aside the outcome of the Halting problem for a moment- it would be conceivable that there could be a perfectly deterministic universe in which a given system is or is not able to predict its own behavior. Or, you could hypothetically have a universe that does not operate in a fully deterministic manner, in which a system is nevertheless able to predict its own behavior, or not. The test mentioned here demonstrates nothing about the nature of the universe being deteministic; it is answering a seperate question. The argument for free will is not that a person can perfectly predict ahead of time what choice he will make at some later moment. The question of free will is concerned with, even being the case that all actions have "causal connections", that there may yet be some degree of freedom within that set of connections. If there is any degree of randomness in the universe, whatsoever, then universal determinism is false... even then, free will may still be false.
Chaos theory is just a very complex cause and effect system that is much to complex for the human mind to map. The innate human perspective is far too simplistic to truly understand the exponential ramifications caused by the SLIGHTEST deviation in a system. If we look from a universal perspective we can clearly see that something as (seemingly) insignificant as bumping into a person on the street (changing their timing how they would otherwise interact in future events) would "cause" a divergent path. Over time a convergent path will vary astronomically,especially if we realize the exponential differences in all parties paths whom had their paths diverged because of the change in timing you caused by bumping into them. There is no way they could interact in the exact same manner once you interrupted their timing of how they would have acted otherwise. Events like this are happening constantly,so to say things are deterministic aren't necessarily true (not even the most powerful computer ever could deal with so many compounding divergent outcomes),but that doesn't mean we have free will. The human brain suffers from the same chaos mentioned above,so we are simple compelled to deal with the path that chaos dealt us. Very few people will get what I mean,because very few people can step outside their human perspective and see from a more universal perspective. We are very biased from our own humanism,so we must zoom out to get a better perspective,without the bias. At least less bias,because to lose all bias we would have to lose all consciousness. Nature has all the answers and zero bias. Basically think like nature,if it could. Emotions make us feel conscious,but they also give us a huge ego (bias).
Incorrect but very good prose. Whether man has free will is not a question of science. It's a question of philosophy and even the speaker said that at the start of the talk. So we need correct philosophy (objective belief system). Here is the triad of metaphysics: a. Existence exists: there is something as opposed to no-thing. Trying to prove no-thing OR "something beyond itself" both lead to reducio ad absurdum, logical error. But you can validate there is something. A "1" and not a "0". So existence is, was and will forever be. b. Your mind can *identify* there is something. So your mind is therefore "real": finite, delimited and potent. c. Aristotle's law of *identification* is implied above and therefore there is truth; and a, b and c is the truth, the whole truth (in a system with all three factors co-existing in the correct order I have given) ; and nothing but the truth. That's it. In summary: you have consciousness/mind with free will. Above we see existence is primary. From existence we get free will/mind as another fundamental truth. Being fundamental there is no "pre-existing" concept possible to prove things. No science. No math. The above is the whole truth and can and above is "validated" to be true: absolutely , infinitely and realistically (pertaining to reality as it "is").
In the smartphone example... what if I have two completely identical smartphones, and I use one to predict what the other one will do..... or if I have a smartphone with every bit in a specific state, and I perform a process, then revert it back to it's initial state, can't I predict what it will do if I repeat the exact same process? I get that this is ME making the prediction and not the phone, but this still seems to imply that the phones behavior is deterministic. I suppose that if quantum mechanics underlies all matter, then the no cloning theorem means that the states will never be 100% identical and I have simply created an extremely high probability
"Only Philosophers argue about free will ", because practical decisions are made by circumstances. The probable reason for the concept is the tendency for dodging responsibility and displacing it elsewhere, thus the invention of a simulation (?) Has free free-will been discovered outside of imagination?
It might have been helpful had he introduced the concept of libertarian free will, contrasted it with legal free will, and made it clear which one he's talking about. The conflation of these two concepts accounts for much of the muddled thinking on the subject.
I don't get how he figured out neurons in the brain can act in a self referential manner? I doubt it. My understanding is they work by a gradient potential. You can always ask, if the universe was backed up a few minutes, would you choose to do exactly the same thing? Most people would say yes.
What he asys is interesting and true, but the definition of free will as the ability to not predict your decisions while ask about them - is not what people usually mean by free will. Free will applies to your past decisions as well, you can reflect on them and say, I could have done any other way.
Is it best to believe you have free will or best to just accept determinism like a Calvin. How much does freedom to choose affect our lives? I guess it depends on your worldview. Material reductionists and dogmatic beliefs don't like ideas of freewill and personal responsibility for your actions
I have a complete suite of answers to the hard problem of Consciousness, if you're interested. I've already "spoiled" my 1980 hInstance in physical life and thus cannot sustain an interest in this physical life instance. I've not been discovered yet by anyone with the exception of Roger Penrose and James sholtz. The depression is consuming most of my experiential bandwidth and thus I can't nor am interested in publishing my original research.
@David Philips Also interested. Can you post them here? Or on a blog? I'm especially keen to review or replace my 1980 instance with the current instance, but I don't know how that differs from a hInstance.
he sure is nervous - it the contagious kind - and i got nervous listening to him he seemed to be the only one laughing at his jokes why show off his latin by reciting such a long phrase ultimately - ho hum - he has the ability to be unconvincing - and since the "halting problem" was central to his argument - he should have explained it
Seth Lloyd never disappoints.
He targets the core of the problem and everything well explained.
Great presentation, fantastic arguments, hey I saw Donald Hoffman among the audience, he is a genius too as Seth!
(1) Am I a decider - no - I am a pattern unfolding according to it own design - fractal in form and movement - accordingly I don't have to decide anything. (2) can I model... - yes - the sociomonics institute demonstrates this capability quite well - patterns are capable of being modeled. (3) Can I predict ... - yes - patterns generally follow predictable courses - consider what you do (individually or collectively) when you are happy vs unhappy as an example and also people's habits take the pain out of having to make decisions lol - The halting problem points to endless uncertainty in deciding due to the assumption that people make decsions logically by considering pros and cons. However, in my experience, decisions are made at the drop of a hat and the logic is usually wrapped around it as an after thought because people like the idea that there is always a reason for what was decided. Wonderful lecture thank you.
Free will is the only miracle worth trying.
Time squared is not always longer than Time depending on the units. Time = 0.5 sec. Time squared = 0.25 sec.
Why you would ever use decimals or fractions for this? I mean... Why???
There is Literally no sense in which we are free. We exist in the ignorance gap between chaos and causality.
I asked my computer what it was going to do next, it said it was going to Disney World.
Sense of Free Will has nothing to with my inability to predict my own behaviour. Just the opposite. A moment ago I predicted I would post this comment. Posting this comment affirms my Free Will. As John Searle said regarding Free Will: I choose to raise my arm and my arm raises. That’s Free Will.
Seth Lloyd using powerpoint? What kind of bizarre alternate universe is this!?
Rob he didn't have a choice but to use PowerPoint... ;-)
13:40 he nailed it
Wouldn't the test be able to _predict_ a split second before you're aware because it takes time for those signals to register in your brain? So your internal self made the decision and now your external self is waiting for that signal but the machine _knows_ what you decided on (based on past data) before that signal is registered and you become consciously aware of it
Hahaha holy shit! this guy is a name dropper! "science withdraws it's moral opposition to free will."
Thank you!
Free will is an illusion , however it is a necessary illusion ..
The question of free will does not hinge upon whether a system is able to predict its own decisions, but whether a system may at any point possess capability to make a decision with a measure of freedom from prior, external causes. Proponents of free will are not necessarily proponents of fortune telling. Even if a system does have the ability to predict its own behavior, this would be entirely unrelated to the question whether or not that future behavior was self-chosen or not.
Free will does require that the future being undetermined, so it is definitely not un-related. Decisions cannot ever be completely self-chosen, because everything in the universe is causally connected. If I can know the state of all the information in the universe at the present, and use that to theoretically predict it's state at any point in the future, then it can be argued that we do not have free will. Seth is arguing that, in a closed system (like the universe), the future is physically impossible to predict.
@@geoffreytylerpayne Determinism axiomatically asserts that every action is completely determined by a set of prior causes. This is not known to be true; it is merely taken to be true, a priori, by determinists. As you mentioned, this conjecture cannot even be tested. But if the assertion is true, then Determinism is true; if false, then Determinism is false. So when determinists propose that IF all relevant variables could be known, and IF they could could be plugged into the right (yet to be discovered) algorithm, then the resulting behavior would always be calculable, they are merely rephrasing the definition of determinism. It is nothing more than mere, unfalsifiable belief.
But all of this is a completely different question than whether it is possible to equip a system with self-referential foreknowledge of its own behavior. Laying aside the outcome of the Halting problem for a moment- it would be conceivable that there could be a perfectly deterministic universe in which a given system is or is not able to predict its own behavior. Or, you could hypothetically have a universe that does not operate in a fully deterministic manner, in which a system is nevertheless able to predict its own behavior, or not. The test mentioned here demonstrates nothing about the nature of the universe being deteministic; it is answering a seperate question.
The argument for free will is not that a person can perfectly predict ahead of time what choice he will make at some later moment. The question of free will is concerned with, even being the case that all actions have "causal connections", that there may yet be some degree of freedom within that set of connections.
If there is any degree of randomness in the universe, whatsoever, then universal determinism is false... even then, free will may still be false.
Awesome talk.
i'm determined to have free wil - HEYoh!
Chaos theory is just a very complex cause and effect system that is much to complex for the human mind to map. The innate human perspective is far too simplistic to truly understand the exponential ramifications caused by the SLIGHTEST deviation in a system. If we look from a universal perspective we can clearly see that something as (seemingly) insignificant as bumping into a person on the street (changing their timing how they would otherwise interact in future events) would "cause" a divergent path. Over time a convergent path will vary astronomically,especially if we realize the exponential differences in all parties paths whom had their paths diverged because of the change in timing you caused by bumping into them. There is no way they could interact in the exact same manner once you interrupted their timing of how they would have acted otherwise.
Events like this are happening constantly,so to say things are deterministic aren't necessarily true (not even the most powerful computer ever could deal with so many compounding divergent outcomes),but that doesn't mean we have free will. The human brain suffers from the same chaos mentioned above,so we are simple compelled to deal with the path that chaos dealt us. Very few people will get what I mean,because very few people can step outside their human perspective and see from a more universal perspective. We are very biased from our own humanism,so we must zoom out to get a better perspective,without the bias. At least less bias,because to lose all bias we would have to lose all consciousness. Nature has all the answers and zero bias. Basically think like nature,if it could. Emotions make us feel conscious,but they also give us a huge ego (bias).
Incorrect but very good prose. Whether man has free will is not a question of science. It's a question of philosophy and even the speaker said that at the start of the talk. So we need correct philosophy (objective belief system). Here is the triad of metaphysics:
a. Existence exists: there is something as opposed to no-thing. Trying to prove no-thing OR "something beyond itself" both lead to reducio ad absurdum, logical error. But you can validate there is something. A "1" and not a "0". So existence is, was and will forever be.
b. Your mind can *identify* there is something. So your mind is therefore "real": finite, delimited and potent.
c. Aristotle's law of *identification* is implied above and therefore there is truth; and a, b and c is the truth, the whole truth (in a system with all three factors co-existing in the correct order I have given) ; and nothing but the truth.
That's it.
In summary: you have consciousness/mind with free will. Above we see existence is primary. From existence we get free will/mind as another fundamental truth. Being fundamental there is no "pre-existing" concept possible to prove things. No science. No math. The above is the whole truth and can and above is "validated" to be true: absolutely , infinitely and realistically (pertaining to reality as it "is").
So what if I'm going to try to figure out what I will do in 1/2 an hour. I'll be able to figure it out in (1/2)^2 = 1/4 hour?
the big question remains, is Seth really using PPT?
In the smartphone example... what if I have two completely identical smartphones, and I use one to predict what the other one will do..... or if I have a smartphone with every bit in a specific state, and I perform a process, then revert it back to it's initial state, can't I predict what it will do if I repeat the exact same process? I get that this is ME making the prediction and not the phone, but this still seems to imply that the phones behavior is deterministic. I suppose that if quantum mechanics underlies all matter, then the no cloning theorem means that the states will never be 100% identical and I have simply created an extremely high probability
"Only Philosophers argue about free will ", because practical decisions are made by circumstances. The probable reason for the concept is the tendency for dodging responsibility and displacing it elsewhere, thus the invention of a simulation (?) Has free free-will been discovered outside of imagination?
I am compelled to believe in free will, while you have lah-de-dah chosen to be a determinist.
12:15 hartmanis-stearns
It might have been helpful had he introduced the concept of libertarian free will, contrasted it with legal free will, and made it clear which one he's talking about. The conflation of these two concepts accounts for much of the muddled thinking on the subject.
Linguistic philosophy (not philosophy of language) is greatly underrated. I recently discovered i had been one for a while.
I don't get how he figured out neurons in the brain can act in a self referential manner? I doubt it. My understanding is they work by a gradient potential. You can always ask, if the universe was backed up a few minutes, would you choose to do exactly the same thing? Most people would say yes.
3:12 Just flourishing his Catholic school education a little bit to put people in their place . . .
lol I have friends that went to Catholic schools, 2 work in a factory and the girl is on the dole. Remember its the person, not the school. Cheers
wow He lost a lot of weight . How's he doing in 2019?
ahaha the hockey stick. Seth is the shit.
Yeah big difference :) Nothing but respect for this dude
What he asys is interesting and true, but the definition of free will as the ability to not predict your decisions while ask about them - is not what people usually mean by free will.
Free will applies to your past decisions as well, you can reflect on them and say, I could have done any other way.
Check that hair lock. Damn.
this has interesting implications for the burgeoning AI movement
Is it best to believe you have free will or best to just accept determinism like a Calvin. How much does freedom to choose affect our lives? I guess it depends on your worldview. Material reductionists and dogmatic beliefs don't like ideas of freewill and personal responsibility for your actions
I have a complete suite of answers to the hard problem of Consciousness, if you're interested. I've already "spoiled" my 1980 hInstance in physical life and thus cannot sustain an interest in this physical life instance. I've not been discovered yet by anyone with the exception of Roger Penrose and James sholtz. The depression is consuming most of my experiential bandwidth and thus I can't nor am interested in publishing my original research.
@David Philips
Also interested. Can you post them here? Or on a blog? I'm especially keen to review or replace my 1980 instance with the current instance, but I don't know how that differs from a hInstance.
@mebe84
Did you hear back from Mr. Phillips?
too much for the young people in the audience :-p
he sure is nervous - it the contagious kind - and i got nervous listening to him
he seemed to be the only one laughing at his jokes
why show off his latin by reciting such a long phrase
ultimately - ho hum - he has the ability to be unconvincing - and since the "halting problem" was central to his argument - he should have explained it
He did explain it... and you couldn't hear the audience laughter because of the way the sound was recorded using a lav mic
well.. he's simply loaded with caffeine
Am I the only person who thinks this guy is absolutely cringe to listen to?
No 😂
Dude, give it up. You're bald 😄
He aged quite a bit..