> I've heard some people cite quantum physics to explain free will and consciousness, although these arguments always seemed completely unsupported and a form of "god of the gaps" reasoning to me.
Certainly a kind of god of the gaps reasoning, but actually quite relevant to our discussions of ai. If the world is fully deterministic, there's little room for the independent thought and free will we thinks makes our human existence special. We are then maybe just relatively sophisticated prediction engines, and even an LLM like ChatGPT isn't fundamentally dissimilar to us.
Certainly a kind of god of the gaps reasoning, but actually quite relevant to our discussions of ai. If the world is fully deterministic, there's little room for the independent thought and free will we thinks makes our human existence special. We are then maybe just relatively sophisticated prediction engines, and even an LLM like ChatGPT isn't fundamentally dissimilar to us.