Comments by "PM" (@pm71241) on "On Free Will, Spirituality, & Artificial Intelligence (Pt. 2) | Sam Harris | ACADEMIA | Rubin Report" video.

  1. I still don't buy Sam Harris' idea of an AI apocalypse. Apart from the basic misunderstanding about what current "AI" actually is in the terms of "intelligence" and that many small super human "calculators" added up doesn't necessarily make "general intelligence",... the argument simply seems to be "you can't rule out my vague what-if scenario".
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  2. 10:20 ... what? ... no... not everything. radioactive decay... pair production. Physics is full of non-deterministic stuff.
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  3. ElephantPenisJr ... that defense sounds to me like also invalidating the entire argument. If stuff is pre-determined even though it's a stochastic quantum phenomenon that would also mean that it's only "determined", but not in any way reproducible... you simply cannot speak about rolling back the situation to the "same state" and watch the experiment again. The example simply doesn't make sense, since there would be only that one chance to observe that situation.
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  4. ElephantPenisJr Well... not that I'm a physicist... but I guess I'm more on the team that believes God actually plays dice.
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  5. Thanny "We simply don't have access to that information." No ... and I would have a very hard time thinking of how an experiment to settle that question would look like. ... it seem unfalsifiable to be... which makes me skeptical of whether it's of any use to entertain the idea.
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  6. Thanny The problem being that if it's not possible to design an experiment which determines whether it's stochastic or deterministic since it has no implications on the world we perceive - then it really doesn't matter whether we model it as stochastic or model any hypothetical underlying deterministic causes. ... No one would ever - under any scenario - be able to notice the difference. So (getting back to the original argument).... if what we perceive as free will is in reality the stochastic nature of quantum mechanics influencing which way our choices go, then it would be indistinguishable from the hypothesis that there's an underlying deterministic cause - which just happens to never be testable since each and every instance of the phenomenon is so unique that it's not reproducible in either time or space.  
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