Scott Aronson on free will

[meekerdb]

John Clark should get a kick out of this:

http://www.scottaaronson.com/talks/
A Scientifically-Supportable Notion of Free Will In Only 6 Controversial Steps: The Looniest Talk I've Ever Given In My Life: Setting Time Aright (FQXi Conference), Copenhagen, Denmark, August 31, 2011

Brent

[Stephen P. King]

--

   Amazing! I genuflect in Scott's general direction! Any chance that there is a video of this talk?

-- 
Onward!

Stephen

[John Clark]

On Tue, Oct 30, 2012 , meekerdb <meek...@verizon.net> wrote:

>> John Clark should get a kick out of this:

http://www.scottaaronson.com/talks/

>  In computer science, we deal all the time with processes that are neither deterministic nor random.

BULLSHIT!

> An example is a nondeterministic finite automaton: if you’re in state s2 and you see symbol a, you could stay where you are or you could transition to state s3.  But we don’t put probabilities on these two arrows: we just say that either could happen. 

If you don't use probabilities then you must follow where both paths go, and that is deterministic. If you wish to make use of true probabilities you will need to add a hardware random number generator attachment to your computer because in any computer that is not malfunctioning they will ALWAYS do things for a reason regardless of what program they are running. If your program calls for a change in state of your computer to happen for no reason you've got to have some hardware where things happen for no reason, like a hardware random number generator.

The guy starts off by saying he was more interested in being entertaining than being correct, but I didn't find him to be either.

  John K Clark

Even more basic, when we design an algorithm, we don’t know which input it’s going to get, we usually don’t even know a probability distribution over inputs.  All we know is, we want the thing to work for ANY input.

 

 

[Russell Standish]

> --

Whilst I would agree you calling him out on nondetermism is not random
thing, he does seem to have an interesting proposal, if you read
on. Its a shame I don't really understand it, because power point is
not really an effective standalone communication tool.

Cheers
-

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Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
Principal, High Performance Coders
Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpc...@hpcoders.com.au
University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au
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[Craig Weinberg]

On Wednesday, October 31, 2012 12:25:12 PM UTC-4, John Clark wrote:

On Tue, Oct 30, 2012 , meekerdb <meek...@verizon.net> wrote:

>> John Clark should get a kick out of this:

http://www.scottaaronson.com/talks/

>  In computer science, we deal all the time with processes that are neither deterministic nor random.

BULLSHIT!

Hahhahahahahahha Ahhh hahahhahahahhahahahahahahhahahha

Aha ah ahhhhahahahha

dying...

Craig