byllz t1_jbl7cy8 wrote
My thoughts. You are restricting Laplace's Demon without justification. You called the demon "the ultimate predictor." A reasonable interpretation of that would be that if something is necessarily true from known information, then the demon will know it. I think this would have been the correct understanding of the demon for the situation. Instead, you have gone with the interpretation that if something is algorithmically provable from known information, then the demon will know it. A given program will halt or it will not. One of those is necessarily true. It is not algorithmically provable. That doesn't, in any reasonable sense of the word mean the program is free.
Second I think you fail to show an infinite computational medium. Perhaps a person with an infinite lifespan in an infinite universe would have an infinite computational medium. And so a question like "will he ever take x action" might be undecidable. However, If you restrict the scope to a given timeframe. "will he kiss that girl he likes today", you are restricting your focus to a finite period of time, and a finite space (i.e. a sphere of space 1 light-day in radius). You lose your infinite computational medium, and suddenly you have a decidable problem.
frogandbanjo t1_jblwto6 wrote
Ultimately, it's hilarious to posit Laplace's Demon and then try to define it at all.
The author talks about "red." People with sight have a sense of "red" that blind people don't. Laplace's Demon, though? Nah, that guy couldn't possibly know anything about time, quantum mechanics, or anything else that might blow a giant hole in every one of my arguments. Not possible.
Honestly. Even extant philosophy can point towards versions of the demon that wouldn't be surprised by anything - not even these systems that are "undecidable," because that "undecideability" relies upon McTaggart's A-series time being an objective, cosmic truth. The paper itself concedes that we should be wary of that premise because of those weird quantum mechanics experiments.
How hard is it to posit that Laplace's Demon sees the universe via B-series time instead? Nothing's unknowable then, so long as everything is determinate. By brute force, if nothing else, the demon knows every output of the algorithm.
Now, does the demon not knowing why the algorithm produces those outputs count as a surprise? Maybe? But then I repeat my point from my own top-level comment: how in the heck isn't the human "agent" equally, or more, surprised by their own actions?
If we begin to elevate "Holy shit why did I do that? I don't even know!" to a truth of the determined universe, I think we've found yet another argument against free will. Perhaps some clever chap will come along to redefine "free" (yet again, and again, and again) as "totally unmoored from literally everything," thus raising an immediate contradiction with the "will" part.
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