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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: December 11th, 2024

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  • IMO free will is commonly misunderstood. It’s not an absolute property, it’s a relative statement. In other words, something doesn’t “have” free will, the term is merely shorthand for “behavior that can’t be predicted”. To me, a rock doesn’t have free will because I can use relatively simple physics to predict its behavior perfectly. Other humans have much more free will because it’s much harder to predict their behavior. A bug is somewhere in the middle. To a superhuman intelligence (supercomputer, aliens, deity, take your pick), humans don’t have free will, because our behavior can be perfectly predicted.

    That squares with my opinion on QM in that even if deterministic interpretations of QM are eventually rigorously ruled out, I would still be of the opinion that if we could poke through the underlying substrate and query an intelligence there, our behavior would be perfectly predictable. Much like a video game character discovering the math behind the RNG that controls their universe. So they’re kind of orthogonal concepts, but somewhat related.




  • Sounds like a bubble, which isn’t a bad thing but not very common in the US IME. I haven’t looked at housing prices in that area, but I’m guessing they would be obscenely expensive for most people. Even where real estate is much cheaper than that, I’ve only really known a few people that have done that sort of thing and they’re all well-off.

    I’m also going to plug the community we’ve got over at !AskUSA@discuss.online, it’s great for casual US-focused questions like this.