Next Gen - a surprisingly deep family version of I-Robot.

Serial Experiments Lain - an anime imagining a life of blurred virtual and reality experience.

This is not anime, not even close. It doesn’t look like it or feel like it. It’s cool and new and deserves a chance, but call it something else.

One of the great features of anime is its ability to show us the impossible. Things that might never work with live action, no matter how much CGI you throw at it. This method starts with the limits of live action and goes from there.

This reminds me a bit of graphic novels that are made from real photos and then stylized from there. It’s a cool new look, but it’s also limited in form.

Nothing to do with free will, and yet the snippet I quoted still appeared in the free will article we are discussing…

>Is determinism true? I have no idea. That’s a question for quantum physicists to fight about. The interesting philosophical question is what if anything would follow about free will if it were true. - OP article

Determinism is as true as makes no difference. No it is not a physics question and nothing follows.

As I think both Harris and Dennett point out, physics is irrelevant here. Being a slave to the dice is no more free than being a slave to the clockwork. Stochastic mechanics are no more free than any other - they must be exactly random. Random behavior is the opposite of willpower.

Besides, a device that is random cannot compute. It’s a very good thing that at the scale of huge neuron cells, all the quantum randomness has averaged out - or the cell machinery couldn’t work. Your brain thinks because your neurons are non-random. The brain is a huge macrostructure with many emergent layers between your thoughts and molecular randomness.

Quantum mechanics isn’t magic or supernatural. It highlights the huge gap in training between physicists and philosophers that anyone could mention quantum anything in a discussion of free will without being laughed out of existence. It is the sort of silly grasping for mysterious skyhooks that Dennett is fond of roasting people for.

I am glad to see Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett in the illustration there. If any two books really introduced the public to the issue it would be Free Will by Harris and Elbow Room by Dennett. Regardless of your own position on the subject or your feelings about these two men, they are required reading. Is there any other work that we think is essential here? If so, why?

This article (and the linked one about Harris) are essentially efforts to add minor nuances to these books. If there is some real new angle I sure missed it.

Having read Dennett’s book, I would argue that his brand of compatibilism is best described by what it is not - by what it attacks rather than what it proposes, if anything.

Compatibilism takes determinism at the level of subconscious cognition to be a given. It then points out all the reasons why people apply motivated reasoning to escape this obvious fact, and how misguided they are. Its only real claim is that the commonsense version and experience of free will does not require the super free will philosophers and theologians are chasing. Anyone who is seeking the latter to justify the former is in error on multiple levels. It is not the compatibilists who are trying yo redefine things, the incompatibilists did it first intentionally to perform a bait-and-switch.

Apart from pointing these two things out, there isn’t much else. What the commonsense free will is, how it emerges, and how we should think about it is murky. Is the divide between conscious and subconscious relevant? Can we draw moral or practical implications from this or are we forced to work-arounds? Do we treat moral failures more like hardware failures and focus on containment and repair rather than punishment and virtue?

I feel Dennett merely raises these resulting questions without attempting to solve them.

If you add Processed Sugars to the list, I am with you.

The Case Against Sugar by Taubes agrees with you.

Which means we can easily measure and remove it. Good luck doing that with humans.

It won’t go away? Have you considered that precision fermentation and cellular ag are likely to replace most animal agriculture? That will make a reduction in fertilizers needed.

Potassium supplements are a placebo. Food sources are much more potent.

And so would be bananas.

I, for one, don’t want delivery vehicles driving over my road all the time.

You realize that delivery vehicles make more noise and smog and clog more streets, right?

Can’t look out the window without seeing the automotive apocalypse now.

Isn’t that the researcher’s job? Why is the researcher asking developers to do research work?

Me too - it’s a bump, then a set, then a spike 80% of the time.

Same way you teach love to children - show it to them. A set of training data full of love will teach an AI what love looks like.

The tricky part is programming the actions.

Is this an art bot? The show it images of love, and how to paint, and it will paint love images.

Is this a chatbot? Show it loving speech, and it will speak with love.