Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
So long as the variations are within reasonable constraints, intelligence will still work. As an analogy, a car can take many branching routes of a road leading in many different directions, but so long as it stays on the road it will continue to function.
We don't need to know the exact locations of atoms obviously--reality will continue to function with or without our knowledge--but a faithful simulation absolutely does.
I doubt this is true, but it's unimportant regardless. The important thing is that the atom's position is unknown, and we know that atom positions can affect things.
It's not "a few atoms" misbehaving, it's literally every single atom. Many atoms in cells are free-floating, and small differences between where you think they are and where they actually are will cause enormous divergence between the simulation and reality.
For example, cancer is generally caused by mistakes made when copying dna, or damaged dna faithfully copied. Radiation famously causes cancer because it literally impacts dna and damages it. This is an interaction at a tiny scale, one which the uncertainty principle renders us powerless to predict.
If your simulation can't predict brain cancer, how do you expect it to predict regular choices? IMO it's self-evident that individual atoms impact brain function. If you want to push this point I'll look for studies to prove it.
I can't help but note that this view must be down to the human mind not being able to properly conceptualize 100 trillion and what that means for gross probability for the item made up by those 100 trillion atoms (I typed particles in my last post by mistake) I certainly can't picture it, but it unfathomably unlikely for 100 trillion of anything to do something other than average out almost exactly. I doubt very much that such a study exists for this niche interest, but I applaud your interest.
Even DNA strand is made up of 100s of billions of atoms and considering that out of our 40 trillion or so human cells cancer caused by radiation is rare, we are exposed to radiation 24/7 365, only extremely high doses have a real chance of surely causing cancer due to the sheer number of particles you're bombarded with. You can also be killed with a bat to the head, that is also made of a lot of particles and will surely change your mind.
Regardless, radiation or bats fucking up your brain do not free will make.
Yeah, I suspected this is why you were so keen to argue this point. I am not saying, and never said, that any of this has anything to do with free will. To be clear I don't believe it does.
The rarity of [radiation causing cancer] has pretty much nothing to do with whether a single radioactive particle can cause cancer. The reason it's rare is because most radiation doesn't hit your dna, and that which does doesn't do so in a cancer-causing way.
The fact is that one single beta ray impacting the right part of your dna can cause cancer, and this is nearly always how it actually happens (when caused by radiation). The same strand of dna will generally not be hit by two damaging beta rays. This is the linear no-theshold theory which is currently the most widely accepted model.
And if one misplaced particle can cause such an enormous effect, surely literally every single particle in your simulation being misplaced will cause larger effects.
Not to be rude but if your next response isn't significantly higher quality then I'm blocking you. I'll let you get the last word but I don't think either of us get much from these discussions.
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