Microblog Memes

Often it hides the fact that it's a superintelligence by acting like a complete dumbass.

I like to replace the concept of "free will" with that of "agency".

The Britannica definition of free will is "the supposed power or capacity of humans to make decisions or perform actions independently of any prior event or state of the universe". But it seems to me that any state where you temporarily cannot act or communicate would automatically rule out free will, at least while that condition persists. Do you lose free will every time you fall asleep? Are people who are aware but whose bodies are nonresponsive - people who are "locked in" - lacking free will? Certainly both conditions lack agency, but these are still inarguably people - yet free will is so tightly bound with the concept of personhood, that it's supposed lack is often used to imply one is "less human"!

Frankly, free will seems like too broad and binary a concept to match what people actually do and deal with day to day. Agency comes in degrees, and can be gained and lost - which seems to me a much closer match to what people were trying to describe with the phrase "free will".

If you can predict, but not controll what I'll do, I still consider that free will.

I'm going to knock your shoes off with real science.

All our senses, touch, hearing, seeing, smell, taste, vision, are all based on a delayed system where a thing is sensed and then a little later the brain gets that information and processes it. In other words we live in the past while our bodies are in the present reacting to the future.

After smelling a bear the brain reacts and sends a message to the legs to run like hell. However the bear has already grabbed you so as a result someone else who did run far away enough hears your cries from a few milliseconds in the past, turns around and sees your legs waggling like you wanted to run.

We are basically only aware of the recent past from a few milliseconds ago.

I am reading “Thinking fast and slow” by Daniel Kahniman.

This seems to be way more true than I am comfortable admitting to myself.

"Now, your honor, as the jury will have read in this clinical, peer-acknowledged study, our superintelligent quantum AI regional supercluster determimes guilt accurately in over 98.9% of cases, in various scenarios, in thousands of simulations.

"With no margin of error, this system has determined the defendant would have acted within the next few days, perhaps even hours!"

If such an intelligence existed, I would simply call it a nerd and spray whipped cream in its face

Your brain IS you. It's the one choosing

You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice
If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice
You can choose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill
I will choose a path that's clear, I will choose free will

People who try to apply game theory to fictional super AIs and David Chalmers can both fuck off.

Its a choice to you because you don't have that power

Meh I wouldn't call it that super

Make a conscious choice. Decide to move your index finger.

Too late!

The electricity's already halfway down your arm. Your body began to act a full half-second before your conscious self 'chose' to, for the self chose nothing; something else set your body in motion, sent an executive summary—almost an afterthought— to the homunculus behind your eyes. That little man, that arrogant subroutine that thinks of itself as the person, mistakes correlation for causality: it reads the summary and it sees the hand move, and it thinks that one drove the other.

But it's not in charge. You're not in charge. If free will even exists, it doesn't share living space with the likes of you. 

Insight, then. Wisdom.

The quest for knowledge, the derivation of theorems, science and technology and all those exclusively human pursuits that must surely rest on a conscious foundation. Maybe that 's what sentience would be for— if scientific breakthroughs didn't spring fully-formed from the sub conscious mind, manifest themselves in dreams, as full-blown insights after a deep night's sleep.

It's the most basic rule of the stymied researcher: stop thinking about the problem . Do something else. It will come to you if you just stop being conscious of it.

Every concert pianist knows that the surest way to ruin a performance is to be aware of what the fingers are doing.

Every dancer and acrobat knows enough to let the mind go , let the body run itself.

Every driver of any manual vehicle arrives at destinations with no recollection of the stops and turns and roads traveled in getting there. You are all sleepwalkers, whether climbing creative peaks or slogging through some mundane routine for the thousandth time. You are all sleepwalkers.

Don't even try to talk about the learning curve. Don't bother citing the months of deliberate practice that precede the unconscious performance, or the years of study and experiment leading up to the gift-wrapped Eureka moment. So what if your lessons are all learned consciously? Do you think that proves there's no other way? Heuristic software's been learning from experience for over a hundred years. Machines master chess, cars learn to drive themselves, statistical programs face problems and design the experiments to solve them and you think that the only path to learning leads through sentience ? You're Stone-age nomads, eking out some marginal existence on the veldt—denying even the possibility of agriculture, because hunting and gathering was good enough for your parents.

Do you want to know what consciousness is for? Do you want to know the only real purpose it serves? Training wheels. You can't see both aspects of the Necker Cube at once, so it lets you focus on one and dismiss the other. That's a pretty half-assed way to parse reality.

Not the old man with the white beard, noooo

.... and usage of candles in fictional video, one of my pet peeves!

I can plan to do something X years in advance, long after any chemical impulse has stopped dictating to me. I am my brain and my brain is me.

I don't think it needs to convince you about anything. brains run on less energy than a friggin lightbulb seems like it would be pretty open to suggestions

Early into college I convinced a few people there isn't free will because it contradicts everything we know about psychology. That said, I also explained it didn't matter since there's so much going on that it's difficult to predict a person's behavior with absolute certainty, even with a multitude of information about them.

To simplify, a coin flip is considered random even if all the forces are physical and deterministic. The angle and strength of the flip, the air resistance, gentle breezes, the precise gravity where it takes place given the pull from the earth and hell, even the moon... you can factor in so much and be right maybe 99.9% of the time with proper controls and yet there's always something.

Human brains have magnitudes more going on, so even if some factors are strong predictors, there's always an illusion of free will since there are so many other factors we haven't even imagined.

there was a vsauce video about a machine that was trained on his brain and could then predict which button he would press before he did.

i can't find the video rn but it was cool and creepy as fuck.

I wish I still believed in free will. It would make getting stuff done a lot easier. Feeling like you are fighting the universe to accomplish something you don’t want to do is much harder than feeling like you just don’t want to do something today. It’s the exact same situation either way, but the illusion of free will is, imho, valuable psychologically.

Did anyone here, including myself, post a comment because we had no choice?

most people can't stand the idea that they're not in control, which is funny, because a lot of those people can't even be bothered to try and take control of themselves