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It Was A Teaser

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Posted by Aurino Souza on July 9, 2002 13:16:02 UTC

I didn't say free will or God were real, I only said it was as real as God. Don't read more than what's written.

" [***1, 5, 5, 1, 9, 6] ... Taken alone, as an isolated series, perhaps. But if the process by which they were created and typed was not random, then no. You have to look at the bigger picture. "

What if there's no bigger picture?

" Is it physically impossible for the universe to behave in a truly random fashion at the subatomic level? "

What you're failing to understand is that "random" is a human concept. What you are saying above is equivalent to this: 'is it physically impossible for the universe to be mysterious if humans didn't exist?"

The question makes no sense. 'Random' (or mystery) is just something humans say when they fail to perceive order in a series of observations. Without observations, without observers, without an attempt to perceive order, there's no randomness. A truly sensible question would be: 'is it logically possible for the universe to behave in a truly ordered fashion at any level?'

" That's misleading and slippery language. It's entirely possible that the future is set but still unknowable to us. "

No, it is impossible by definition. If the future were set then it wouldn't be the future, it would be the past.

" (I might add that the computer would still know the method by which you would attempt to defeat it if it truly 'knew' your brain) "

Nonsense. If the computer in my experiment hides information from you the experiment becomes silliness, as the computer can always tell it was right even when it was wrong. That's not the correct way to conduct thought experiments.

" [So free will is really the act of creating actualities out of possibilities...] That's a bad definition. Natural, non-sentient systems can produce this effect as well. "

It is a bad definition, I can't be 100% clear all the time. Sorry about that.

But you do have a valid point. Any reasonable definition of freewill (or consciousness for that matter) ends up implying that everything in the universe has freewill (or is conscious). Which only means we don't know what we are talking about.

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