ohum

A computing machine (not taking environmental factors like cosmic rays into account (though, why not?)) is deterministic, unless it interfaces with a truly random source of entropy. My physicist friend has said, there may be no randomness, only complexity.

Is all deterministic or do conscious entities have free will, or...?

The decisions made by your philosophical zombie will either be predetermined by the programming, or seeded by randomness. The decisions made by such a machine cannot be proved to be functionally equivalent to the decisions made by a conscious entity, and belief in such is a matter of faith.

Belief in randomness itself is a matter of faith. It’s impossible to prove that any event or measurement is truly random, and yes, there may be hidden variables- there’s no way to test.

There is no rational reason to believe that conscious behavior, consciousness, feelings, and all the activity of the mind, are functionally equivalent to a program and/or randomness.

Sounds like you are believer in the religion of materialism.

Please don’t take this as a personal attack. Your comment and certainty sound like religious fanaticism. The belief that consciousness is merely computation is unproven, and a matter of faith. It always seems a little short sighted when people claim to know something about consciousness and the mind based on a belief that the brain amounts to a biological computer. As an example of an alternative possibility to brain as a biological computer: in a holographic universe the brain itself is an emergent system. Or, Buddhists say that the material world as we perceive it is interdependent with mind, which is more fundamental than form. Some interesting phenomena that present problems with mind as programming running on a biological computer are the placebo/*cebo effects and Wim Hof :). Mind over matter, man.

Perhaps the advertisements you see after a purchase are intentionally delivered. Maybe testing has found a consumer is more likely to value and keep (vs return) a purchase, or recommend it to their friends, when related ads continue to be served for $time.

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At some point the system realized people are prone to failure. It then started deploying itself redundantly without dependence on people. This helped, but the people interfered. To fix this the system started building self replicating physical instances, creating new dependencies on material that resulted in grey goo (or paper clips).

https://outline.com/R7vGvk is an outline version of the very good (from 1996...) Wired article, "Mother Board Mother Earth" https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/

Is there an answer to that question? And, why is the distribution of matter not random? Maybe some sort of gravitational grouping? (eg earth's iron core, centrifugal enrichment of uranium). Or affinity for some orientation relative to field states, magnetism/diamagnetism etc.?

Like attracts?

If Mark Zuckerberg had the best interest of other people, like, all of humanity and the world writ large, in mind, I think it would probably be apparent.

Rather, it actually appears as though he is being intentionally deceitful.

Perhaps his rationale is based on some measured or calculated outcome, maybe he actually thinks he's doing some good in the world. Hopefully his intention is positive!

Or, maybe he is beholden to investors.

He seems to be a fool with power, not someone with anything meaningful to say.

Is he a classic case of the old adage: "absolute power corrupts absolutely"?

Platform! Graph! Stream!, and, abuse people for profit!!

Are Facebook/Insta/Wechat/etc. good for the long term prosperity of humanity? I would argue that the answer is a hard "no", and I think there's ample evidence.

If he were a noble person, he'd shut his harmful systems down.

Shame on Mark Zuckerberg. History will not remember him kindly.

environmentally responsive guided objects, ERGO

It's always possible to imagine bad and worse scenarios. Fear is always available, and can be applied to any situation. Believing that technology is the tool of an "evil" system, or that it facilitates "evil" is not healthy for the believer or anyone else.

Naturally, we are all aware of the power of tools and especially modern "smart" systems. How can we trust anything? We can imagine how things could be as bad as we can imagine! I've decided, even at the risk of being naive, that I must not fear the machine, fear the network, fear anything. We living beings all basically want the same outcome- happiness. Having convenient tools help us actualize that outcome is a good thing. Just because we can imagine some deep dark conspiracy of "evil", behind the scenes, deceiving and manipulating us, doesn't mean that there is any such thing. Nor, of course, that there isn't. Since we can't know, let's just enjoy all of our cool gadgets while being happy...

Although, I'm also beginning to feel as though the best decision will be exiting the information super-highway :)

If y'all haven't read it, The Joy Makers is a pretty fun sci-fi exploration of technological routes to happiness, and possible downsides to "plugging in".

There are defined ways of simplifying mathematics, computationally, such as via the CSP-NT computational laws

SequenceL is translated to C++ (or others). It's especially well-tailored, still, to time-critical and performance optimal multi-core systems. For HPC, no better alternative atm imho

It could be made into a real meta search engine, and you could have layers of searchers, a network of searchers, with a common memory space, and parallelize the whole thing in sequencel, throw it on a vps with a few hundred/thousand cores, index the entire ipv4... You would probably need to use a big cloud

Sci-hub, and the availability of research, have been and is, something to be grateful for.

It seems like fear is the motivating function for restriction of knowledge, and that is understandable.

"Science's...Queen"