Kindly comments on Is Determinism A Special Case Of Randomness? - Less Wrong

-4 Post author: DonaldMcIntyre 04 May 2015 01:56AM

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Comment author: DonaldMcIntyre 05 May 2015 05:38:56AM 0 points [-]
  • Consequence of previous events: when things pass from state to state as a consequence of a causal chain of actions that are not initiated or continued by a living decision maker that purposely provoked them.

  • Consequence of decision making: when a living being acted on a chain of physical events and modified them according to its will and therefore the pattern of the sequence is not consistent with random mechanical events.

If your decisions aren't a consequence of previous events, then they are just meaningless randomness.

I agree with the idea that living things make decision based on the observation of reality and must not initiate actions out of nowhere.

And randomness is very distinct from the old concept of free will. Randomness is not your will. You have no control over it. Rather it controls you.

When I mention free will on my OP I am not referring to the ideological concept,but just my personal opinion that decision making in our brains must obey to some randomness in order to be free of regular certainty in physics.

I don't think that randomness is in our brains,I think there must be randomness in the mechanics of physics.

Comment author: Kindly 05 May 2015 05:51:36AM 2 points [-]

What makes you think that decision making in our brains is free of "regular certainty in physics"? Deterministic systems such as weather patterns can be unpredictable enough.

To be fair, if there's some butterfly-effect nonsense going on where the exact position of a single neuron ends up determining your decision, that's not too different from randomness in the mechanics of physics. But I hope that when I make important decisions, the outcome is stable enough that it wouldn't be influenced by either of those.