creativesoul wrote: ↑Sun Nov 11, 2018 10:07 pm
The origen of the idea is entirely relevant to any and all discussions about what free will is...
It is an ad hoc idea invented with the sole purpose to exonerate the God of Abraham from the existence of evil.
What nonsense.
I am free to conceptualise "free will" however I wish. You know - because I have free will. And I need not care one bit what you, or God or Abraham says that "free will" is or isn't.
I have given you my conception. That is what I mean by 'free will' - decision-making under uncertainty. Risk management.
I find my conception quite useful. Whether it is the same conception of 'free will' as the one you have - that's a different and unrelated matter.
creativesoul wrote: ↑Sun Nov 11, 2018 9:58 pm
The probability of a kettle boiling within ten minutes is determined by influencing factors. Knowledge of these factors is used when gathering data for statistical analysis.
Nonsense. Either the kettle boils in 10 minutes or it does't. I can do the experiment 100 times and I can draw some conclusions without any understanding of physics whatsoever.
You can tell me about the results of the test. You won't know shit about how and/or why that's the case.
creativesoul wrote: ↑Sun Nov 11, 2018 9:58 pm
The probability of a kettle boiling within ten minutes is determined by influencing factors. Knowledge of these factors is used when gathering data for statistical analysis.
Nonsense. Either the kettle boils in 10 minutes or it does't. I can do the experiment 100 times and I can draw some conclusions without any understanding of physics whatsoever.
You can tell me about the results of the test. You won't know shit about how and/or why that's the case.
You don't know shit about how/why your computer or the internet works. And yet - here you are. Using it. Because it behaves in a predictable (deterministic?) manner. Like any decent tool should!
To many of the Greeks, the connection with reality was too tenuous to be worth bothering about. Axioms were regarded as ‘self-evident truths’, dredged by pure thought from reality, and the philosophers didn’t believe the axioms could be other than they were. Believing that they were abstracted from real things like pegs and ropes was far too mundane. So Plato came to articulate the idea that all the important truths about the world could either be known to the inner eye directly, or deduced from them by pure reason. A more conservative man might have concluded that there were mathematical truths which could be derived from just about any set of rules, and observational truths about reality, and that the two were not in general the same. But intoxicated by ‘Greek Magic’ as mathematics has been called, Plato went the whole hog.
Most people, no doubt, decided that this might be true in principle, but if you wanted to know which horse could run faster, it was a lot cheaper, quicker and less intellectually taxing to race them than to sit and think about it an awful lot. Those people who had lost all their money betting on horses and also had a disposition to think, felt it was a better to solve the problem by pure thought, and looked down on those who owned the horses or bet on them. This habit has continued to the present time.
I've written programs on desktops waaay back when Apple was still competing with Tandy. I've written countless programs in G-code. Now, as a result of all of the 'user friendly' software and patch programs(they interpret/translate one machine language into another or some software program into machine code) there is much less need to know G-code. All manufacturing machines still run on it.
Last edited by creativesoul on Mon Nov 12, 2018 7:41 pm, edited 1 time in total.
TimeSeeker wrote: ↑Sun Nov 11, 2018 10:31 pm
Nonsense. Either the kettle boils in 10 minutes or it does't. I can do the experiment 100 times and I can draw some conclusions without any understanding of physics whatsoever.
You can tell me about the results of the test. You won't know shit about how and/or why that's the case.
You don't know shit about how/why your computer or the internet works. And yet - here you are. Using it. Because it behaves in a predictable (deterministic?) manner. Like any decent tool should!
Comprehension is not required for competence....
The probability of a kettle boiling within ten minutes is determined by influencing factors. If you do not know any of the influencing factors, then you do not know what you're talking about when talking about the probability of the kettle boiling in ten minutes or less. That would come out upon close scrutiny concerning the justification of your probability claims about boiling kettles.
creativesoul wrote: ↑Mon Nov 12, 2018 6:54 pm
I've written programs on desktops waaay back when Apple was still competing with Tandy. I've written countless programs in G-code. Now, as a result of all of the 'user friendly' software and patch programs(they interpret/translate one machine language into another or some software program into machine code) there is much less need to know G-code. All manufacturing machines still run on it.
Sure. That doesn't mean that you understand how a modern computer works. It just means that you could (in theory) reverse-engineer it. But in practice there are thousands of components, billions of transistors, millions lines of code and it is highly unlikely that you understand how every single one of them functions individually and as a holistic system. It would take you a lifetime to reverse-engineer it all.
You take all that complexity for granted and it doesn't stop you from using the computer. Much like I take all of physics for granted when I use a kettle.
creativesoul wrote: ↑Mon Nov 12, 2018 6:54 pm
I've written programs on desktops waaay back when Apple was still competing with Tandy. I've written countless programs in G-code. Now, as a result of all of the 'user friendly' software and patch programs(they interpret/translate one machine language into another or some software program into machine code) there is much less need to know G-code. All manufacturing machines still run on it.
Sure. That doesn't mean that you understand how a modern computer works. It just means that you could (in theory) reverse-engineer it. But in practice there are thousands of components, billions of transistors, millions lines of code and it is highly unlikely that you understand how every single one of them functions individually and as a holistic system. It would take you a lifetime to reverse-engineer it all.
You take all that complexity for granted and it doesn't stop you from using the computer. Much like I take all of physics for granted when I use a kettle.
