I believe the contents of this course were lost to time but I’d like to be surprised.
[0] https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/Lawvere's+fixed+point+theorem
I've never seen a coherent definition of "free will", but I don't see how someone whose decision is random has any more or less of it than someone whose decision is nonrandom, so IMO it doesn't really have anything to do with free will one way or another.
In one of the lectures Conway goes in depth into the philosophy of free will, which he believed in at a time when it was (and still is) almost universally unfashionable.
Any system will appear unsystematic until the precise rules governing it are known.
Since we can’t ever demonstrate that we’ve exhausted all possible theories of a system, the possibility always remains that tomorrow we would discover a perfectly effective one, and from that point the system would be as plainly deterministic as anything else.
In other words: we lack the capability to definitively distinguish between our own lacking knowledge and a system’s (potential) intrinsic non-determinism.
We might instead interpret the Free Will Theorem as demolishing a position otherwise claimed: People have free will, but people are special; most other things don't have free will, and certainly particles don't! But the Free Will Theorem explicitly contradicts this position.
In terms of philosophy, there are several nuances to consider. There's Kochen-Specker itself [1], its untestability and its applications. There's free will itself [2], including whether free will is definable, is useful for ethics, and indeed whether free will exists. I think it's interesting that [2] has no mention whatsoever of [1] or the Free Will Theorem more generally.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stern%E2%80%93Gerlach_experime...
We can’t really decide to do that because we don’t have the free will for it. Preordained fate has decreed for there to be no such education.
I mean, you argument appears self-defeating to me. Is it not?
So in this case, it has all been determined that we do not have the education currently, but that says nothing of what the future is determined to be.
HN says i'm posting too fast so I cannot reply to other comments. I can only edit this comment.
I am compelled by the notion of free will described by Schopenhauer (expanding on Kant). Namely, that 'one can do as he wills but not will as he wills'. Lived experience leads us to infer an indeterminate/inseparable energy/force/Will that we perceive with our senses and organize through the concepts of time/space/causality. However, we, being on the 'inside' of one particular object, are in a peculiar state: we are free to accept or reject this Will.
If I ask you to think of a number between 0 and 10, a number may pop up in your head (seemingly out of nowhere, though clearly through some process affected by genetics/neurochemistry). Despite this, you (whatever 'you' is) are still free to accept or reject this proposition.
In this sense, people can still be punished for accepting propositions of murder in some coherent way. You are affected by, but not the sum total of, your genetics and neurochemistry. Nevertheless, the latter might play a large role that we shouldn't discount.
The outcome happens from all the previous moments you lived. Randomness doesn't make a person have free will and randomness may just be an illusion from our lack of understanding when it comes to what's resulting in the outcome we appear as random.
We're the sum total of genetics, environmental factors and all the external forces upon us since birth. That means if we're being punished it was outside the realm of it could have been different.
My life got better after I rid myself from those thoughts. I firmly believe, they are dangerous.
I really love the way this article puts the issue: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NEeW7eSXThPz7o4Ne/thou-art-p.... The idea that determinism takes away free will from us is inherently based on the idea that we're something outside of physics, and that physics is exclusively deciding the future instead of us. However, if you make the common assumption that our brain is a material object running within physics and producing our decisions, then there is no contradiction between deterministic physics and whatever is meant by free will.
Another way I like to think about it: If you made an AI and ran it in some closed simulation, would you expect it to care whether the simulation was completely deterministic (with all probabilistic events operating from a pre-chosen seed and a strong RNG) or had some kind of randomness? The question won't directly affect the AI's life inside the simulation either way. Wouldn't you find it weird if it did actually care and had a preference about that detail of its world, or if it thought it wasn't a true free AI if there was no randomness in its simulation? If the AI thought the world had randomness or not, and then learned the opposite, you'd find it weird if the AI restructured everything it knew about itself and the world directly based on that. If you the operator happened to toggle whether the simulation had randomness several times over its run while working on its code, and at some later point the AI was let out of the simulation, you wouldn't expect the AI to take offense at this change. There's nothing about its quality of life, decision-making abilities, or life circumstances that would be affected by the answer. It's just an implementation detail of its world that's not directly relevant to an intelligence, except in matters of modeling how the world works.
