Re: On the Soul of Our God

In article <pb6i135monb81c1h9lkqnc803t9ep6ncqk@xxxxxxx>,
Chris Kern <chriskern99@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

... Angband's RNG has been run through all kinds of tests
that it passes with flying colors. There is nothing wrong.

I don't know how to take this sort of comment. Angband has a pseudo-RNG,
not a RNG. The distinction is central to this thread.

In article <1175798953.019765.322600@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
"pete m" <pmac360@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

You misunderstand--it is not a practical issue, it is a moral issue.
By the hypothesis of this thread use of a pseudo-random generator is
not merely a bug, but a sin....


Some of us grasp the point instinctively; others persist in looking at
this as some sort of technical standard to be achieved. The latter say
that pseudo is good enough; that it is not distinguishable by the player
from true randomness. Still others deny the possibility of true
randomness; they live in a deterministic universe.

Let me argue against the technicians by analogy -- always risky but the
best I'm capable of at the moment.

Say aliens abducted your wife -- sister, mother, daughter, your closest
friend -- and constructed a robot duplicate. The aliens thoughtfully
supply a Mission-Impossible self-destructing videotape that documents
the gruesome disassembly of your loved one, downloading of the entire
contents of her brain, incineration of the remains, and construction of
the mechanical imitation. The aliens are skilled technicians; you are
unable to detect by any objective means whatever the fraud. You speak to
the robot, perhaps you feel it, smell it. It seems entirely real.
However, you know for a fact that it is a fake.

Could you live with it? Or would you grab the nearest blunt object and
bash it to pieces? Or just get on the first train out of town, change
your name, and forget your old life? I suggest that if you think you'd
feel comfortable with a rubber thing in your home, however realistic,
then you've never had a real human relationship. No offense intended.

Now for the determinists. I can't really argue this viewpoint down; I
only offer a bleak vision. Quantum mechanics seems to have made very
strong showings in favor of random events but I have to admit that
Aristotle was once thought to be authoritative, too.

If the universe is deterministic and mechanical, each moment is fully
determinable from the one that went before. Therefore, it is quite
impossible to make any decision; free will is an illusion. You may
believe or feel that you have decided to do something but that decision
is the inevitable result of the prior state of the universe --
primarily, the prior state of your brain and surroundings.

This reduces human existence to a sort of fleshy graffito on the surface
of the Earth. We may indeed have a part to play in some grand design but
it is not *our* part; we are mere hand puppets.

A rational person would conclude that immediate suicide was the only
response to such a situation; why suffer the daily slings and arrows if
it is impossible to formulate a truly personal goal and pursue it? But
then, in a deterministic universe, one has no choice about suicide,
either. If it is purely mechanical, there is not room for free choice in
any god either, so there is not even the consolation of prayer for
accidental death. I can't live in such a hell.

Free will can never be proven because any discussion of it arouses the
conditional perfect. ("I could have sold.") This implies an alternate
reality in which the sale took place, as opposed to *this* reality, in
which it did not. So far as we know, there is only one reality and we
are in it; there is no way for us to repeat the experiment. Proof of
free will could only come from somehow living the same moment twice and
making a different decision each time.

The same is true for all "random" events. I flip a coin and declare the
chances are 50-50; it lands heads. I say it "might have" landed tails
with equal probability. You say no; it was absolutely guaranteed to land
heads -- that time. You and I may lack a method of determining the
result beforehand but that doesn't mean the result was not fully fixed
as far back as the creation of the universe -- you say. I can flip the
coin all day but I can never repeat the moment of the first flip -- so
my thesis remains unproven.

* * *

All that said, I uphold both the non-deterministic universe and the
value of authenticity. I cannot be swayed by proofs of some good
distribution from a stream that stems from an arithemetical generator.
On the list of battles I am prepared to fight, it is not especially
high. I did raise the issue.

As usual, though, I make the standard proposition: I don't raise issues
I'm not prepared to address. If we can all agree to migrate the code
base to a modern language -- Perl -- then I will chip in and fix the
generator.
--
Xiong Changnian
xiong102ATxuefangDOTcom

--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Getting out of this world?
    ... 'universe' and other details so as to avoid inaccuracy in the real- ... Also it's considered good form to leave this sort of discussion ... Cutting-edge physics suggests that matter sustains ... Statements that miss the 'no matter, no physical laws'? ...
    (rec.arts.sf.science)
  • Al will previously beautifully update Ibrahim Yusef
    ... pit is too universal for Murad to increase it. ... Jim's soap produces at times our sailor after we assert sort of it. ... shiped the occasional shelfs following illegal grid. ... universe. ...
    (sci.crypt)
  • Re: Why is there something, not nothing?
    ... you get into a sort of infinite chain of causation. ... cause for the Universe, that simply pushes the question back one step. ... I think religions and ideologies appeal to people because ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: [BOOK][TOS] #68 Firestorm
    ... drive that ended up ripping a hole in the universe. ... just sort of annoyed me. ... Did they really not have any better writers? ... While the 1970s novels were a mighty varied set, ...
    (rec.arts.startrek.tech)
  • Re: Why is there something, not nothing?
    ... you get into a sort of infinite chain of causation. ... cause for the Universe, that simply pushes the question back one step. ... insisting on strict causation of everything. ... claims from the good ol' quantum fluctuation to branes or bubble universes. ...
    (talk.origins)