Slider comments on Explanations for Less Wrong articles that you didn't understand - Less Wrong

18 Post author: Kaj_Sotala 31 March 2014 11:19AM

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Comment author: Slider 04 April 2014 02:09:52PM 0 points [-]

Yes, it sound right. Tried to reread the thread on whether there is more than terminology confusion going on. To me it's not obvious that there is a contraposition between will and determinism. And I am guessing what kind of silliness is employed to get to that end result. It seems like a "one and only one can win" situation is constructed but I can describe the same situation so that both win.

I was saying that you being told your character (correctly) is not dangerous or limiting. It means that you have a character and it's harder to pretend as if you could do everything. However the option would be to not have any character. And that isn't omnipotence that would be nilpotence. For some purposes you can forget what the black box contains but to claim that fundamentally the black box doesn't work in any way? A common situation is that you don't know how it works or that it must work somehow exoticly.

You could also say that it isn't the case of character of not-you making the character of you nilpotent or unnecceary. It's a question of character of all overlapping with the character of you (which it kinda obviously needs to do).