I think you are conflating thoughts about laws of logic, T(L), with the actual structure of what logically holds, L.. But the painting of a pipe is not a pipe. And it doesn't need to be.

Since we can notice our thoughts, we can attempt empiricism on our rationalisms, and then we can model the structure of our thoughts on what pragmatically works when we make these attempts. We can form thoughts about what works and call those thoughts T(L). Because what worked actually worked, and what didn't work actually didn't work, we can know that T(L) corresponds to L to whatever degree our thoughts are really about what worked, which we can test empirically.

The first time I tried tickling myself, I expected to experience the urge to laugh. Not experiencing that urge violated my own expectations. However, I would not say that I freely chose to not experience the urge to laugh.

I wrote the last sentence with an expectation of what my behaviors and their experienced outcomes would be. My prediction was as reliable as one might expect, yet I feel like my choice free, or at least more free than the earlier not-experiencing of the urge to laugh.

Since I can observe myself, but resolutions of expectated observations seem orthogonal to my sense of freedom, I doubt violations of expectation say much about free will one way or the other.

The world harmfully romanticizes all kinds of things that are nevertheless worth understanding and pursuing. The corrective action is to stop romanticizing, not to romanticize the opposite extreme.

Also weirdly splits pure blood, half-blood, and one or the other. As if you could be pure blood without being one or the other, or half blood without being one or the other.

Same thing. Intelligence is just generalized knowledge about patterns that may or may not be functional in a given physical or social context.

Thanks! Huh.

But, okay, suppose we had a magnetized array where all the magnets are entangled, so if one is up all are up. The system would only have a single bit of information. No matter which magnet you flip, the whole array can only express a single 1 or a 0.

If you could physically force them to disentangle, my intuition is that this would increase the thermodynamic entropy of the system, because the magnets are now more mixed. But wouldn't it also increase the informational entropy, because now you can express more independent bits?

(I mean, to be honest, not sure if answering this will make me any less confused.)

Much obliged!

Cool article! Could someone Explain Like I'm 14 the part about how informational entropy decreasing linearly with time proves mutations are not random?

I've never been able to get a PC-based version of anything to run successfully, so if anyone makes or encounters a colab, huggingface, or similar implementation, I'd much appreciate a link!