A Short Conversation on Wandering Toward a Goal by Don Limuti

Don and Wilhelmus,

I am also giving this essay a "6" because it is readable, creative and on topic, but there sould be more. I also think giving someone a one without comment just hurts the contest.

Jeff

Hey, this essay was fun! Short and written as a dialogue, what a pleasant surprise! Now that I think of it, I wish someone had posted a comic...

I am not sure of whether I follow your connection between free will and emotion. Do you mean free will is an emotion, among many others? Do you mean that free will derives from emotion? Or the other way round? As I see it, both the sensation of free will and emotion are emergent properties of some macroscopic systems. But are they causally connected? I get a bit lost here. For me, free will, and the subjective sensations, are more difficult than purposeness, that's why I focused on the latter...

I hope you win the contest.

ines.

Hi Ines,

1. Thanks for you review....much appreciated.

2. You say "I myself argue that there are no goals per se, but that we choose to see them. Not exactly because their existence makes us happier, but rather, because their detection allows us to make predictions, and thereby, to be more fit to pass on our genes."

Yea, Darwin and Dawkins have highly regarded points about how genes foster evolution and are selfish respectively. I will not argue with Darwin, however, Dawkins is wrong. Genes are both competitive and cooperative (see Yaneer Bar yam's work on complexity).

Instead of using the words goals I will substitute "choice" and rephrase your sentence: ""I (Don L) argue that there are no goals per se, but that we (humans but perhaps not all life) choose to see them. These choices are made because they satisfy us emotionally, (in healthy individuals they tend toward happiness), and thereby, to be more fit to pass on our genes."

About Choice and Emotions: I posted on one of mad max's minion's blogs "your emperor is totally nude (in Italian)". This minion was a determinist but his emotion (aka greed) caused him to delete my post (followed by my score plummeting). Was his choice determined by mathematics? This minion was much less fit to pass on their genes than someone like yourself.

In spite of my stated intention, ha ha. I hope you win this contest.

Don Limuti

Dear Don Limuti

You found an original way to draw the attention to the issue of determinism, surpassing the size limitation of the essays!! It is clever, not boring, bold, risky, and it works! Congratulations!

About determinism, what seems to result from observations is that at a sufficient large scale, the evolution of systems is deterministic. Chaotic, random, etc, behaviors at small scale always disappear at a sufficient large scale. This is a very convenient approach because it preserves our free will: at our scale, as at the scale of a molecule of the atmosphere, the behavior can be anything, while the evolution of human society, as the one of the atmosphere, at enough long times-scale, is deterministic. However, I have more information that shows to me that things are not simple, far from that. A careful reading of my essay will show you that necessarily I know much more that I am saying there. And what I say in the essay is already quite ahead of present knowledge, and many will thing that it is just speculation. What I can say to you from what I know is that the answer to the question of the determinism is not "yes", or "no", or "depend on the scale".

You asked my opinion on the role of global warming. In the paper in vixra that I mention in the essay, you can see in detail the past and future of Earth's climate and where the global warming stands. I can also say to you much more by email, if you are interested.

I saw your DWT; I found it rather interesting; I will dedicate some time to analyze it.

I voted your essay in accordance with what I say in the first paragraph of this comment.

Thank you for having "knocked on my door"!

Alfredo Gouveia Oliveira

Hi Don,

I think I would have enjoyed a much longer conversation between you and Lexi. The presentation format was very attractive and fun for me. I might try it for a future essay. I will have to side with Lexi on this one, in the sense that I do think free will and decision making is deterministic, that does not mean we have to do the same thing under the same conditions every single time. There is a variability there without having to invoke the other extreme of total randomness.

If you have the time, kindly take a look at my essay. I present (sufficient) physical conditions under which goal oriented agency could rise in systems.

Cheers

Natesh

Hi Don,

Thank you for your comment on my page.

You have written a nice little conversation but in the end I am not sure what your conclusion is.

And why did you write Dad and not Don towards the end, was that intentional ? Who made that choice ??

Cheers,

Patrick

Dear Don,

Thank you for virtual support through the cyber space on the article there are no goals as such its all play, and i totally enjoyed your little conversation with Lexi, your virtual self i suppose :)

PS : We are relatively real but absolutely virtual.

Love,

i.

Don

I enjoyed your approach and conversation. My essay addresses my personal view of reality and goals by telling real life occurrences that helped to form and describe those views. You may appreciate a brief account of my own test of free will versus determinism--search to "owl" or "kitty"--

Sherman

Dear Don,

That was a quick, fun essay! Wanting more, I clicked on the link at the end, read the section you pointed to and, following the footnotes, discovered Jenann Isamel's fascinating book, "How physics makes us free". Beyond reading the submitted essays, that's one of the most rewarding aspects of this contest: following the references at the end of the essays to discover even more weird/great/unbelievable/twisted/amazing ideas.

Thank you, and good luck in the contest. And do write a longer dialog next time!

Marc

allo don,

thank you for making me laugh. i gave you an 8 because your paper reminded me of a student who entered an Oxbridge Exam, with this horribly complicated and contrived question, where he thought about it, sat there for an hour, and wrote "Yes". then he sat there for another hour, crossed it out and wrote, "No". towards the end of the exam he crossed *that* out and wrote, "Maybe".

He got an A for his essay and was accepted to Oxford :)

Don

A short and delightful essay.

We observe billiard balls interacting, sharing kinetic energy back and forth to one another before slowing for table and air frictions. We coin the concept of determinism.

We learn about particle physics interactions, and note that it is in many ways comparable to the billiards.

We observe that life is made up of these objects comparable somewhat to billiards and wonder if because we are made up of deterministic parts, whether determinism equals our whole?

This question is not so difficult in my mind. Billiard ball interactions are representative of a simple system, their shared causes and effects have the immediacy of the moment of contact.

Life on the other hand is not a simple system, and it has attributes which the billiards do not. Such as being freed from the limits of reacting only with immediacy, by memory which allow past experience to be drawn on and influence now or future. Also freed from immediacy by the capacity to imagine possible futures and make choices that might best lead toward perceived needs. Something special happens when a system breaks free from the limit of immediacy of interaction.

When a biological system can enter an environment and observe and rationalize many aspects of it, then make many abstract considerations based on experience of past and anticipations of future. Then from all this computed information formulate a plan that might allow for several possible predicted contingencies. Then you have a system that has become very distantly removed from the example of simple billiard interactions.

But I guess nature might have just created a mindless unconscious computer type program and been done with it. And to a large extent that is precisely what nature has done, as exampled by the human sub-conscious. But somehow, and for some reason nature seated a conscious observer type system in a seat in front of the larger computing capacity of the sub conscience. And so here we are peering through our eyes as though they are windows on the world, and talking to ourselves and also listening to ourselves within the confines of our own heads, in conscious thought.

So anyway, I feel that as soon as biology began its escape of the immediacy of interactions, it had begun migrating an ever expounding sliding scale that ends with infinity, towards choices and capacity for free will. Our experience exists somewhere along this scale, but probably not close to infinity, but also very far from being merely mindless billiard balls. So the answer is, free will does exist and is definable in terms of a sliding scale.

If you recall, you gave my essay a very generous rating and review. Thank you kindly. I have had a look at the links you provided me to your work, and I do have some questions in mind for you. I did note your prescription for dark energy acting as gravitons. Very interesting indeed. I too believe dark energy observations are closely related to considerations of gravity. We must talk about this once the contest is concluded, if you will please?

Great essay and I rate you highly

Steven Andresen

http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/2890