Posting with the purpose of sparking some intriguing conversation.
Question:
A perfectly rational donkey starves between two identical hay piles because it has no reason to choose one. Science now constructively proves the universe is fully deterministic—no "could have done otherwise." Do your choices and fights still matter? Would you keep acting as if they do?
First off, if a perfectly rational donkey got stuck on choosing haystacks, whether to take a step in this direction or in the other and all these minor decisions, it would eventually (out of boredom) come to the conclusion that there are more important things to do (if not, Ubermensch) and in order to do them, you have to ignore all these trivial details? After all, does it not value it's life as having more value? If a perfectly rational donkey starves to death precisely because of it's rationality, I choose to believe that it is not a perfect rationalist, it is a perfect donkey.
"Science now constructively proves the universe is fully deterministic"
So we know the universe is deterministic and there is a machine that can compute the future with certainty (it's efficiency is another matter). The thing is, proving this to be false is incredibly trivial if we lived the same life we do today. That is, all you need is a prediction for something to be at some position and time (or anything trivial, there are several logical approaches from here that focus on figuring out these trivial events and then hinging on those to gain information about the machine, but I don't think I'll get into any of that), and you just have to ensure that isn't the case, whether it is a molecule of in the air, a leaf on a plant, a hair on your skin, anything. It's almost beyond trivial.
The only way it wouldn't be easy is if we in fact did not live the same life we know today, particularly with such a machine, if we are indeed able to retrieve predictions something with tremendous power must exist. So much power that it will at least have enough power to not allow any human with the intent to disprove the machine to either not be able to obtain a prediction from the machine or have so much control over them, that they are not able to take the step(s) needed to disprove the machine.
If a human were intent on disproving it, they would first need it to make a prediction and gain knowledge of it and then prove it to be false. Now this power is able to stop us either before or after we learn of the prediction (which could be literally anything trivial). Stopping us before the prediction would be much easier than after, so we can probably ignore the second case (if you think not, comment).
So with the machine comes something with enough power to, at the very minimum, stop everyone with the intent of disproving the machine from getting a prediction from it. Now one solution is just that there is no mystical power, depending on what you think mystical means, but rather it is time/space that is the issue. The time, and/or space, needed to compute a prediction is so large that no output will be observed, the event will have occurred by the time the prediction is made.
I suppose this is the most intuitive obstacle at first glance, but I'm sure there are a few more, I guess some ideas are: power over consciousness, inability to output full prediction completely.
To those who scrolled all the way down to see the conclusion
If a machine that can compute predictions is built, there's probably no way to get a prediction from it, even for things that you and I can predict very easily.
Posting with the purpose of sparking some intriguing conversation.
Question:
A perfectly rational donkey starves between two identical hay piles because it has no reason to choose one. Science now constructively proves the universe is fully deterministic—no "could have done otherwise." Do your choices and fights still matter? Would you keep acting as if they do?
First off, if a perfectly rational donkey got stuck on choosing haystacks, whether to take a step in this direction or in the other and all these minor decisions, it would eventually (out of boredom) come to the conclusion that there are more important things to do (if not, Ubermensch) and in order to do them, you have to ignore all these trivial details? After all, does it not value it's life as having more value? If a perfectly rational donkey starves to death precisely because of it's rationality, I choose to believe that it is not a perfect rationalist, it is a perfect donkey.
"Science now constructively proves the universe is fully deterministic"
So we know the universe is deterministic and there is a machine that can compute the future with certainty (it's efficiency is another matter). The thing is, proving this to be false is incredibly trivial if we lived the same life we do today. That is, all you need is a prediction for something to be at some position and time (or anything trivial, there are several logical approaches from here that focus on figuring out these trivial events and then hinging on those to gain information about the machine, but I don't think I'll get into any of that), and you just have to ensure that isn't the case, whether it is a molecule of
The only way it wouldn't be easy is if we in fact did not live the same life we know today, particularly with such a machine, if we are indeed able to retrieve predictions something with tremendous power must exist. So much power that it will at least have enough power to not allow any human with the intent to disprove the machine to either not be able to obtain a prediction from the machine or have so much control over them, that they are not able to take the step(s) needed to disprove the machine.
If a human were intent on disproving it, they would first need it to make a prediction and gain knowledge of it and then prove it to be false. Now this power is able to stop us either before or after we learn of the prediction (which could be literally anything trivial). Stopping us before the prediction would be much easier than after, so we can probably ignore the second case (if you think not, comment).
So with the machine comes something with enough power to, at the very minimum, stop everyone with the intent of disproving the machine from getting a prediction from it. Now one solution is just that there is no mystical power, depending on what you think mystical means, but rather it is time/space that is the issue. The time, and/or space, needed to compute a prediction is so large that no output will be observed, the event will have occurred by the time the prediction is made.
I suppose this is the most intuitive obstacle at first glance, but I'm sure there are a few more, I guess some ideas are: power over consciousness, inability to output full prediction completely.
To those who scrolled all the way down to see the conclusion
If a machine that can compute predictions is built, there's probably no way to get a prediction from it, even for things that you and I can predict very easily.