Re: determinism, freewill, chaos, and circular causality


Curt Welch wrote:

I've never had any issues understanding that for one, there are events
which we can't know the cause of (QM and other events which happen at the
limits of our ability to measure). Whether they have a cause or not is
something we will probably never know - and no matter what science uncovers
in the future to explain the cause, there's likely always going to be some
lower level event which will replace it which we won't know the cause of.
And at the same time, I've also had no issue with understanding how these
events can be amplified through iteration and feedback effects to create
what is generally know as chaotic systems. All this seems fairly obvious
to me. It's the source of all noise in the universe.

What I take issue with however and what strikes me as invalid, is to
believe that these types of effects have something important to do with the
operation of the brain or intelligence. On the contrary, I see the entire
purpose of the brain as being a system which must find, and amplify, all
the non chaotic effects of the universe. Brains are in effect, noise
filters designed to remove all the noise which the universe is full of.
They are anti-chaotic devices if anything.

it's possible brains could filter out external noise , but utilise
intenral noise.

Most of what you quoted above I agree with - except that last part where
they seem to be justifying noise as a source of creativity. It's even
worded in way to imply that maybe, without a universe full of noise, there
would be no creativity. I don't agree with that at all. I believe
creativity is nothing more than the result of a system which has the power
to search a design space for useful solutions. It makes no difference if
the search is random and chaotic and influenced by unpredictable low level
noise sources or whether it's totally deterministic. The end result is
just the fact that "good" options are found. There are plenty of examples
of genetic algorithm programs which are 100% deterministic but yet have no
problem being extremely creative (creating things that no human was able to
create). Creativity is just the ability of the system to recognize a good
solution when it sees it and to take advantage of all the good solutions it
finds.


Saying a "creative" system could be deterministic does not mean
it is deterministic. In some instances. real randomness would solve
a problem better than pseudo randomness. If you are trying to
evade a predator, it helps if the predatory cannot work out which
way you are going to jump next.

.

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