> His intent at the time was to open a physical explanation for free will by taking the recourse to quantum nano-tubules magnifying true randomness to the level of human cognition. As much as I'm also skeptical that this actually moves the needle on whether or not we have free will (...vs occasionally having access to statistically-certain nondeterminism? Ok...) the computable stuff was just in service of this end.
Free will is a useful abstraction. Just like life and continuity of self are.
> I strongly suspect he just hasn't grasped how powerful heuristics are at overcoming general restrictions on computation.
Allowing approximations or "I don't know" is what's helpful. The bpf verifier can work despite the halting problem being unsolvable, not because it makes guesses (uses heuristics) but because it's allowed to lump in "I don't know" with "no".
Well said! In case anyone is curious how this is discussed in AI, this whole conversation is pretty well summed up by the idea of the "Frame Problem" https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/frame-problem/
Thus why intuitive algorithms change everything, even if they're useless on their own...
You could reasonably consider free will to be an abstraction or a language game, but it is closely linked to moral responsibility, prisons, punishment, etc, which are very much not language games.
I don't think free will exists because I don't think supernatural phenomena exist, and there's certainly no natural explanation for free will (Penrose was correct about that). But I have a very non-nihilistic view on things [1].
I suppose if you really wanted to you could view condensing useful abstractions out of a highly detailed system as a kind of language game, but I'm not convinced that that's useful in the context of investigating particular abstractions rather than investigating the nature of the process of making abstractions.
I think the very concept of an abstraction is a language game, one that speaks to the old Platonic ideals of Greek philosophy - with all the good and bad that implies. This specific language game takes on a very concrete meaning to programmers that can be quantitatively analyzed by a compiler but epistemologically it’s just another abstract concept (I hate philosophical inception).
Free will is a useful abstraction. Just like life and continuity of self are.
> I strongly suspect he just hasn't grasped how powerful heuristics are at overcoming general restrictions on computation.
Allowing approximations or "I don't know" is what's helpful. The bpf verifier can work despite the halting problem being unsolvable, not because it makes guesses (uses heuristics) but because it's allowed to lump in "I don't know" with "no".