This is the most interesting assessment of free will I've seen in a long time. I've thought about this a great deal before, particularly when trying to work out my feelings on this post. Obviously we shouldn't expect any predictor to also be able to predict itself, for halting problem reasons. But yeah, why couldn't it shop around to find a way of telling the prediction which preserves the outcome? Eventually I decided that probably there was something like that, but it would look a lot more like coercion than prediction. I, for instance, could probably predict a persons actions fairly well if I was holding them at gunpoint. Omega could do the same by digging through possible sentences until it worked out how to tell you what you'd do without swaying the odds.
This is one of the most fun descriptions of the weird, pseudorigorous intuition you pick up eventually doing while math. It's really hard to explain to someone who hasn't done it, or even worked mainly in a different area, why one hand-waved statement is better than another which seems equivalent. This comes remarkably close, with both the fast and dirty method as well as why it sort of works and why it doesn't work completely. Fantastic work.
Huh, people really do have a lot of variation between them. I'd personally call anxiety a subtype of fear, but I suspect I have coarser grained emotional labels than some or even most.
Regardless, it's fascinating you don't experience anxiety when thinking about death. I guess unless we ever find something to actually prevent it for it you're certainly luckier than I.
The word I use for what you describe is shock, or perhaps if you're allowing something longer term, dread. I use fear to mean the emotional state I usually (but not always) experience when anticipating negative outcomes. It is characterized by a contracting feeling in the chest, racing thoughts, and what I'll call for lack of a better phrase "negative emotional valence". I experience this when anticipating death, which is an outcome that is quite negative indeed. I also experience this, due to my social anxiety, before talking to almost anyone, despite not actually anticipating a negative outcome, and before important tests, which I don't expect to cause me danger but could cause something bad to happen.
Do you experience this emotion in this way? If so, what do you call it?
The names we assign emotions are, of course, somewhat arbitrary, but I find it interesting that what you call fear seems to be centered around a possible danger. What do you consider danger to be, if not a risk of death? If an assassin were hunting you with a completely painless weapon, would you experience what you call fear?
I enjoyed this book a great deal, and would like to go deeper on the immune system. Does anyone have book recommendations?
Unless it's computronium made of non-interacting matter, fairly. It's not just distant galaxies, there's plenty in the Milky Way too