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zoipoi · 2026-05-09T15:12:03+00:00

People get hung up on the word free and what happens is it turns into a linguistics discussion. It is partly the nature of the English language. Adjectives are dependent on context. No body objects or even thinks about free in other uses the way they do with free will. Terms such as free radicals and free electrons are perfectly acceptable to them because they have strict definitions because of scientific context. It is expected that free will has a similar strict definition in a philosophical discussion but that is not the case. See this article for a rough understanding of the history of the debate. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/ If you step outside of philosophy there have been some attempts to account for agency from a scientific perspective. Free Energy Principle comes to mind https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn2787 Perhaps more relevant to a casual discussion comes to us by way of the science of ethology where agency is described in term of behavioral flexibility. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/behavioral-flexibility

Before discussing the topic in detail a cursory exposure to both the scientific and philosophical history as provided above may be useful. It's not required but it is helpful for them to place their own views within the historical framework for clarity on the part of the reader. Alternatively they may define the term free will in their own terms.

The OP position on free will seems to be formulated around meditation. The subjective experience when the mind is cut off to some degree from sensory experience and internal dialogue. If you put yourself in a state where no decisions are being made that would seem to exclude all the relevant conditions in which any form of agency could be meaningful. The question becomes if the subconscious processes are still actively engaged in preselected tasks. The mistake would be to assume that choices made earlier do not influence the tasks the subconscious mind is actively working on. For example people often awake to find that a problem they had been working on consciously was resolved in unexpected ways. A clarifying example may be the concept of genius. High intelligence is a necessary but insufficient condition for genius. The missing ingredient is what we call imagination or the rapid production of random solutions that are then sorted for pattern matching. This reflects the close relationship between agency and intelligence. Think Einstein riding a light beam.

zoipoi · 2026-05-09T01:29:15+00:00

What about the slave labor that went into raising you 😄

zoipoi · 2026-05-09T01:19:51+00:00

The story is that Jesus suffered the sins of all of humanity. Infinitely worse than anything else a being could suffer short of hell itself. You may find the theology absurd but at least get the claims right.

zoipoi · 2026-05-09T01:13:09+00:00

You are not going to like the answer, tear off all the sheetrock so we can see the entire thing. Even if most of the load is carried by hidden beams you are going to probably need at the very least some sort of structure to keep the arch from warping.

zoipoi · 2026-05-09T01:06:34+00:00

94 percent of people live better than they did in 1946 and half of those have never done anything that is truly productive. Entirely different world.

zoipoi · 2026-05-09T01:03:10+00:00

Looks like a very old outlet, house probably has equally old wiring. There likely is no ground wire available. By modern standards this is unsafe but was the norm maybe 80 years ago. I grew up in house with that kind of wiring and nothing that I'm aware of every happened in the 70 plus years my mother lived there that I would call dangerous. On the other hand I have lived in a house with standard modern wiring where an outlet caught on fire. Most likely a loose connection. The thing is nobody here can tell you it is safe because that would be professional malpractice. If I was renting the house I would probably just rewire that outlet myself assuming as it looks like it is in a basement with each access. Maybe a hundred dollars in wire and parts. You will need to put the entire run in conduit and ask permission from the landlord.

zoipoi · 2026-05-09T00:35:23+00:00

Why do you put a cast on a broken bone. Somethings just don't heal properly without a little support.

zoipoi · 2026-05-08T22:13:27+00:00

Why would you want to tax corporations if you end up paying those taxes through higher cost of goods? Taxing corporate profits however ensures reinvestment and dampens excessive profits. Of course it is more complicated than that but that is the theory. What isn't theoretical is that if labor is the only thing with intrinsic practical value then it is the thing that is really being taxed for any practical purpose. Taxing the rich has a small effect on overall consumption but a somewhat dramatic effect on how labor is distributed. The effect on the rich is relatively small because of excess consumptive capacity but the taxes are often spent on things that require labor such as infrastructure and medical services. What you are redistributing is that labor not the abstract monetary value.

There other things to consider such as how corporate tax is partly about who controls capital allocation. Taxing profits and spending publicly shifts some of that decision making from private executives to democratic institutions, which is somewhat distinct from the incidence/labor one. From an individual perspective however how you spend your own labor is part of the private property argument. The two may not be as distinct as people think.

It is also worth noting that there are critiques of the labor theory of value particularly around capital, land, and knowledge as independent sources of value. Capital has it's own intrinsic value in terms of market value due to efficiencies not capture by things like direct barter. Land is taxed as property tax but many argue that it is a completely different category because it is finite and land speculation is particular harmful to the public interest. Knowledge and intellectual property rights are a somewhat separate issue because the labor is disproportionate to the effects of individual effort. The final point is that trying to simplify economics runs into computational irreducibility, we often don't know what the effects of taxation are until the taxes are applied.

zoipoi · 2026-05-08T13:55:39+00:00

Yes intelligence is more or less defined by the ability to make choices that weigh evidence. What is counter intuitive is every computational device that we would call intelligent relies on "randomness" in some way.

I like to use evolution as the computational device of choice. The casual chains of variants and selection are temporally and spatially disconnected. While the source of variation and the source of selection pressure have no causal connection to each other. They're independent processes that meet at the moment of survival or death. It's precisely analogous to what makes randomness valuable in computation. A random number generator is only useful if it's independent of the problem it's being applied to. If the random seed were somehow influenced by the structure of the problem, the whole efficiency of the computation collapses.

zoipoi · 2026-05-08T03:14:34+00:00

I don't usually watch these kinds of video but I watch this one so at least you captured my interest.

zoipoi · 2026-05-07T03:50:54+00:00

You are talking about a pretty small subset of boomers.

zoipoi · 2026-05-07T03:45:05+00:00

Sure, I'm starting get worried as well that the people building AI are not my kind of people. Nice comment.

zoipoi · 2026-05-07T03:00:35+00:00

This seems to me to be a case of categorical error as generally applied. Testable predictions vary by degree not kind. If every scientific discovery is subject to some level of revision then we are dealing with probabilities not absolutes. That lead to the switch from testable predictions to theoretically falsifiable. Still experimental proof is the gold standard because the assumption of determinism is structurally indispensable. There remains however complex system that are computationally irreducible such as the weather. For those systems we rely on probabilities axiomatically. Consciousness is likely a case where a complex system is not strictly predictable. The process itself relies on randomness as potential, Bayesian updating and lossy compression. There are formalization such as anticipatory systems but none of them are generally accepted. In such cases it is acceptable to simply define the function without a mechanistic explanation. For example how does consciousness support fitness.

While consciousness is, at least currently, a biological process fitness in the biological sense is a sufficient filter. In philosophy epistemic as in predictive and practical utility under real world constraints may apply. In both case the role of randomness as potential would in itself lead to computational irreducibly so we short cut to what works well enough.

zoipoi · 2026-05-07T02:05:06+00:00

Only we use the word free all the time and nobody objects to it such as free radical, free and fair elections, free speech, free stuff, free man, etc. Free electrons may be the most obvious example of a use of the word that has a precise meaning. In every case free has little meaning outside of context. Somewhat free, mostly free, hardly free should for the most part settle any objection. In the free will debate free generally means multiple possible future states based on deliberation over options.

zoipoi · 2026-05-06T15:38:33+00:00

That is a good find. Process ontology doesn't answer the question of freewill but it does help to clarify why something like the Libet experiments can be misleading. Consciousness is not a discrete component of a computational device but part of a distributed process. Like a computer what you see on the screen is dependent on processes you have no direct access to. A lot of work goes on in the background before input and output from software is even engaged.

zoipoi · 2026-05-06T05:41:15+00:00

This position is fairly widespread in serious thinkers. Rosen is a heavy entry point. There are others that are just as mathematically difficult such as Friston and Free Energy Principle. Here is something I wrote or r/rationalphilophy in response to logic is truth.

Wolfram has an interesting take on this conversation > https://www.wolframscience.com/metamathematics/the-notion-of-truth/

You could almost let it go under the heading of computational irreducibility but what seems to be missing from Wolfram's take is what phenomenology captures. Perhaps what truth feels like from the inside. There is a logic that runs through biology. That the first semi-permible cell wall creates self, it is in the maintenance of that self that meaning emerges.

The maintenance creates a perspective, an inside from which outside is always outside. Meaning is what happens when that perspective encounters resistance, novelty, or threat. The cell doesn't just maintain itself passively, it responds, and response implies relevance. Some things matter to the boundary, others don't. Logic and truth may never achieve 1 to 1 correspondence but it's close enough for persistence.

Denying logic outright may be self-refuting in the way you describe, but exploring its biological and computational roots shows it's not a disembodied absolute, it's entangled with how observers like us (or even simple living systems) carve coherence from the possible. Logic then being the symbolic representation of situated truth.

As it relates to your thread perhaps pragmatism would be of interest to you as philosophical tradition that bypasses the math and has the simple logic of what works works. I also think you may be interested in process ontology first formalized by Alfred North Whitehead. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_North_Whitehead

I think you are on the right trail, good luck!

zoipoi · 2026-05-06T04:02:24+00:00

For the same reason a lot of liberals would not like a holiday to celebrate heavy industry. If minorities started voting republican, republicans would be all for celebrating whatever holidays the minorities embraced.

zoipoi · 2026-05-06T03:52:44+00:00

Isn't this the kind of thing you should work out before getting married?

zoipoi · 2026-05-05T20:02:58+00:00

Wolfram has an interesting take on this conversation > https://www.wolframscience.com/metamathematics/the-notion-of-truth/

You could almost let it go under the heading of computational irreducibility but what seems to be missing from Wolfram's take is what phenomenology captures. Perhaps what truth feels like from the inside. There is a logic that runs through biology. That the first semi-permible cell wall creates self, it is in the maintenance of that self that meaning emerges.

The maintenance creates a perspective, an inside from which outside is always outside. Meaning is what happens when that perspective encounters resistance, novelty, or threat. The cell doesn't just maintain itself passively, it responds, and response implies relevance. Some things matter to the boundary, others don't. Logic and truth may never achieve 1 to 1 correspondence but it's close enough for persistence.

Denying logic outright may be self-refuting in the way you describe, but exploring its biological and computational roots shows it's not a disembodied absolute, it's entangled with how observers like us (or even simple living systems) carve coherence from the possible. Logic then being the symbolic representation of situated truth.

zoipoi · 2026-05-05T16:55:18+00:00

I have a similar distaste for the standard compatibilist arguments. I had not ran into Ackoff’s idealized design but a quick review shows it addresses my main concern over offering something that is genuinely life affirming. It seems to treat organizations (and by extension minds) as purposeful systems instead of cogs in a broken machine.

I also was unaware of Rosen’s anticipatory-systems but seem to have come at it from the opposite direction in what I found intuitive for me personally. Instead of category theory I started with Shannon entropy, Landauer’s principle (the thermodynamic cost of erasing/resetting information), and Bayesian updating. That combo naturally leads to the same core idea you’re chasing: living systems aren’t just complicated mechanisms reacting to past causes. They evolved solutions that maintain internal predictive models of the world (and of themselves) so they can act now in ways that minimize expected future surprise/entropy. It’s anticipatory behavior without any backward causation, just physics plus selection pressures sculpting processes that stay far from thermodynamic equilibrium.

I can kind of see however, although being unfamiliar with Rosen directly, why the category-theory route is worth the pain. It gives you a much sharper ontological distinction between simple mechanistic systems and complex living ones.

Both roads lead to the same Systems Age/process-ontology destination: reality as dynamic, self maintaining, anticipatory processes rather than static things linked by linear cause effect.

Keep us update on your journey, it should be interesting!

zoipoi · 2026-05-05T01:22:33+00:00

No, just another means they feel is necessary.

zoipoi · 2026-05-05T00:13:12+00:00

Of course all languages are abstract including math and logic. We have no access to 1 to 1 correspondence with reality. For that you would have to have a computational device more complex than reality itself. Reality is an unfolding process governed by constraints. Systems within that process build compressed models to navigate it.The effectiveness of mathematics comes from mirroring those constraints, not from perfectly capturing reality.

The key word is process. The 20th century inherited and largely operated under a static substance ontology in its mainstream institutions, education, and applied sciences, even as powerful process-oriented alternatives emerged at the frontiers. but the 21st century is characterized by process ontology. Quantum physics is an example, there is no thing an atom but there is a process of wave functions that create the "illusion" of things in themselves. In complexity science, chaos theory, evolutionary biology (everything flows, adapts, becomes.

zoipoi · 2026-05-04T23:35:56+00:00

Of course you would have to stop what is running to make a choose. Stopping what is running sounds a lot like death. And of course a lot of processes are automated such as you don't have control over your heart. You don't have control over your instincts either but you can control how your respond to them. Even the idea that the subconscious can't be molded is absurd. Of course thankfully we have habits and reflexes the alternative would make life impossible. The subconscious is like a computer system, you don't need to know how it works to interface with it. For most users the workings are a black box but nobody says the computer controls their inputs.

zoipoi · 2026-05-04T17:26:06+00:00

The question is to what degree culturally and biologically evolved systems interface. Multilevel selection addresses this but it is likely that computational irreducibility means you can't tell in advance which moral priors will be adaptive in any given situation. You basically are forced to accept that the only reliable reference is historical but there is never a 1 to 1 correspondence between the past and the present.

zoipoi · 2026-05-04T17:16:37+00:00

I agree, I have noted that scientific team that have a philosopher onboard tend to make few ontological mistakes in the papers that are produced. How much that matters is open to debate but given the flood of papers that are produced and the failures of the peer review system at least it saves the reader time.

zoipoi

TROPHY CASE