Comment on Eliezer's Sequences and Mainstream Academia

Fri, 21 Sep 2012 12:44:36 GMT

Downvoted for being atleast twenty times more long-winded than necessary, and still failing to describe what a "free will" without determinism would look like.

Computer programmes can consult random-number generators where needed, including 'real' ones implemented in hardware.

Pseudo-random, but I'll let that trivial point slide. The more significant point is that those random numbers are utterly meaningless in themselves -- the meaning and worth of a program lies in those aspects that are not random, or in how it deterministically uses a random variation. We can use a pseudo-random generator to use in a cryptographical program, or in an artistic program, or in a mutation-simulation program -- but that pseudo-randomness is only meaningful in how it's deterministically used.

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