this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
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Yo OP. We're carbon based, which you accept. Diamond is stronger than almost all metal, and it's pure carbon. Why wouldn't we have metal in our veins? We atomically won that round before inflation was even over.
I'm just playin, carbon under high enough pressure is metal too.
Twice over, my favorite fact is that humanity has only existed during the time frames that the moon and the sun have been the same size in our sky, this allowing total eclipse - which is so obviously ridiculously rare I don't see the point in quantifying with maths.
I think it's bizarre to think we have free will. Everywhere around us, in all our tech, tools, toys we see the realities of determinism. Cause and effect. To think that our minds are somehow not governed by this in a universe that unequivocally is is beyond Babel levels of arrogance.
Beyond that, the idea that's gaining ground about shared consciousness I find really intriguing. Rather fascinating stuff.
Consciousness is the biggest mystery of the all, after all.
I'm mostly with you except for the determinism. Not only do we KNOW that the universe is fundamentally probabilistic and not deterministic, all our technology works extremely hard to combat random errors because small electronics are absolutely not deterministic, they are just engineered to have a low enough randomness so we can counteract it.
Did something change? Last time I checked we didn't know whether in the grand scale the universe is or isn't deterministic.
That we know that the universe isn't (seemingly) deterministic locally doesn't change anything about that.
I'm pretty sure it is essentially that any propensity the macro-scale universe has for the appearance of determinism is an illusion since the fundamental scales of the universe and everything it is built on are probabilistic. Nothing built on probabilistic foundations can be deterministic. It can appear to be. In large enough samples the law of large numbers smooths all the chaos out, but that is all our world is. Mathematically smoothed chaos. We as a species have known that for a very long time, but it has only begun to permeate the social zeitgeist in recent years and there is still a lot of pushback from certain sections of society.
The best theories are non-deterministic, but of course we don't know if they are the last word about reality. To put it another way, we don't know why the math is non-deterministic in our best equations.
The old equations were deterministic, but they turned out to be wrong. Something similar may happen here.
Allowing for quantum randomness does not help the free will argument. Randomness might be "free", but it is certainly not but "will".
But it does. If the universe was deterministic, choice would be impossible because all outcomes would be predetermined.
Quantum randomness may not directly provide free will but it does exclude determinism, which would make free will impossible.
This "choice" is just the manifestation what you are at that moment, the sum of everything that has influenced you up until this point. Whether that complex tangle of cause and effect was "determined" a million years ago or affected by random fluctuations the whole way, including a moment ago, doesn't change anything. "Free will" just doesn't make any sense, regardless of whether one considers predeterminism to be the alternative.
We don't know whether the universe is deterministic, though. That's the only slimmer of hope for free will we can have.
The fun thing is, even if we assume our consciousness isn't entirely deterministic, the most reasonable alternative would be pure randomness.
Which, in the end, makes absolutely no difference in the free will argument.
Huh, I always thought of us having free will in response to cause and efect, not in place of it. But maybe I'm understanding free will differently?
If the universe is deterministic, it means that every particle has an infinitely predictable path. And our body and brain are full of particles which could only ever move in the predetermined way. And because our thoughts are only movements of neurone, which in turn, as everything, are made of particles, every action of ours would be predetermined and we could never decide otherwise than we did.
I think Camus might have summed it up best when he said the only real choice (therefore, freedom to exercise will) humanity has is whether or not to commit suicide.
Except the universe is full of non-determinism that we work hard to keep quiet in our toys.
We do have metal in our veins. Blood has metallic taste precisely because of iron, which carries oxygen through our body.
Metal has no taste tho. What yr tasting is you. VSauce or Nilered did a video about it.
You can test it yourself, just degrease and wash a coin. Once clean, no taste.
Of course it is not free metal. Probably oxide. And no, I am not going to taste rust.
Years upon years of being told this cannot make me not taste metal from stainless steel cups/canteens and forks, even brand new and/or freshly scrubbed to hell and back. I can't use stainless steel tumblers because of this - even if I keep my tongue well away from it, and it's the cleanest dish in the world, it makes the drink taste metallic. No amount of youtubers just insisting I don't/can't taste a thing can actually compete with a lifetime of experiencing this problem. And I have, multiple times, tried all the things they say to do to fix the "real" problem - but no. Steel tastes like steel, always.
Hypothesis: this is one of those things some people can taste and others can't, like how there's a whole group of "cilantro tastes like soap" people and everyone else is like ????