The eye actually evolved four separate occasions (at least). Because at every point in making an eye, you gain an advantage. And that is how the lens also evolves.

IIRC the book "Selfish Gene" goes into this. Great audio book that's worth listening to a few times.

I'll check him out. Thanks!

To clarify a few benefits of this definition;

• We CAN benefit from spending more energy on a decision.
• We CAN delude ourselves more and more if we don't second-guess previous decisions (at our detriment to economy/social situation/professional situation/love life, etc). Previous decisions are just memories, we hold no more duty to them than the calories we spent watching the TV last night.
• We CAN make efforts to control for biases if we make an effort.
• We CAN make efforts to make higher quality decisions with even minor effort, especially if we mull over the decision until the actual deadline instead of jumping on the first decision that falls into our mind.
• WITHOUT this type of free will, more effort on decisions would be pointless, because we'd be just as likely to hit the best possible decision at 1 calorie spent as an infinite calories spent. So we should be happy we have this "lack" of free will as philosophers previously claimed we had, and instead have this free-will-within-causality.

This is the key thing, "first explicitly defining free will". Something I studied for a few years (full time).

Imagine this, a chess computer. Feed it more and more energy (time or computing power) and then it does better and better chess decisions. Give it infinite time or computing power. Does it have free will? No.

Because it has no insight into how or why it is doing what it is doing. It has no insight into how it made the decision it made at the 1 hour mark, and it has no insight into how it made the decision it made at the 2 hour mark if you let it keep thinking it over. It is thinking at introspectral magnitude zero, it has zero insight into its own brain.

Human brains are just the same, or any brains, only evolution is what programmed our brain's chess computer program, not a human programmer.

But if we had a brain scanner that allows us some insight into how exactly we made a decision, so that we can make a new decision knowing how we arrived at the previous introspectral magnitude zero decision, then we have an introspectral magnitude 1 decision.

Then we can use the brain-scan of the decision we made at introspectral magnitude 1 to find out how we made that decision, and make a new one (that either keeps the original decision, or doesn't), to get introspectral magnitude 2. Spectre 2 for short.

And we can keep going. If we keep going forever, with either an infinitely big brain that consumes an infinite amount of energy instantly, or an infinite amount of time, then we get up to an introspectrum level decision.

Introspectrum decisions is the closest thing to free will that exists in a causality-driven universe/multiverse.

This is kinda impractical for each decision, since infinite energy consumption for just ONE decision is rather impossible. But you can still approximate some introspectrum decisions within some degree of error that becomes negligible. A simple example is that you can always work out Pi to a suitable decimal count for whatever you are calculating, to such a degree of accuracy that you can't really decide that you're wildly wrong on the next trillion or infinite spectre levels. If you build a bridge with that level of Pi in your calculations, you're unlikely to later change your mind to any worthwhile degree. You might always find a better place to put the bridge, or a better bridge design, but you can approximate introspectrum level decisions in some situations.

For approximating introspectrum level decisions in humanity right now, you'd need to first be WELL versed in behavioral psychology (see Dan Ariely on youtube if this is the first time you hear that term), as well as evolution (see Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins for a good intro), as well as applied statistics (don't really know any great popular science figure-heads for that, just find whoever tells you the average doesn't reflect the data pool. For example, if you get 60% more money and lose 50% for each coin toss, the average wealth will go up but most will end up bankrupt). If you are WELL versed in all these things (and probably reasonably versed in a few other things I can't fit in this character limit), then you CAN even approximate introspectrum decisions in some cases even without an actual brainscanner capable of determining exactly how you arrived at your decision.

I coined introspectrum type free will years ago, maybe I should make it easier to find on google.

The budget to look for ELEs is still rather tiny. Which means the vast majority of telescope-time is ground-based, which means we can basically only look at the sky that's the half that is away from the sun. So anything that takes the trip through the inner solar system in under 1 year can easily sneak past our telescope efforts. We won't even be looking in its direction. Its the planetary version of a scary movie where the baddie walks up behind the character.

And even after the 1.2 billion dollar space based telescope that NASA is working on making, we will still be blind behind the sun and a few other narrow but many billions of directions on the sky (difficult to tell if a tiny light right next to a bright star or nebula is a rock, without massive computing power and individual light-spectrum analysis of every single light source on the night sky).

We likely won't have really good coverage before we get two or three or four such 1.2 billion dollar space telescopes going. Then they can take pictures with all of them directed at the same place at the same time and we'd only need to analyse pictures that differ between each telescope because everything outside our solar system has very low parallax.

Until then we're just holding our eyes closed on Earth going 67 000 miles per hour around the sun, hoping nothing hits us or vice versa. And the planet is a big gravity-well that sucks everything towards it.

>They meant if you were travelling precisely with the same velocity and vector as the wind you wouldn't hear it.

Happens all the time when skiing.

The wind hits the ears that hear the wind.

PS: And by the way soundwaves are generated as long as any gas isn't traveling at uniform velocity and direction. Same as how waves on water happen without land.

All that shiny moon stuff is 99.9999% from the sun. Otherwise we'd never have any dark bits of the moon towards us, would we? :P Its not like the moon actually gets carved in half when half of it is dark, its still there, it just doesn't get sunlight! :P

When the moon is half-full, half the far side of the moon is in fact a part of the light side of the moon.

How did people ever start mistaking "dark side" for being "far side"?

I wish people used "far side of the moon" when they mean the far side that is never seen. Because there is light there.

You aren't asking this about millions of species that did die out because they aren't resistant to much.

Its sort of like asking "why did THAT someone win the lottery last time?" - Millions upon millions of partakers, someone wins regularly.

PS: Not that there isn't a possible answer to this question, I'm just viewing this from an applied statistics angle.

look into engineered negligible senescence (ENS) instead of faster than light travel. Its a lot easier to colonize the solar system and beyond when people can receive rejuvenation treatments every time they become 45 years old again, to become 25 again, so that they live long enough to save up for their own ticket and live long enough to get there.

The original would go into an advanced MRI machine and the copy would only remember it. The original would still be stuck in his/her/they own brain.

The copy would always think the "upload" worked. As long as the original don't survive the process.

As long as we agree that the original won't move anywhere, we can probably agree on the particulars of the copy being changed compared to the original. save those neurons for ENS. (engineered negligible senescence) (And even ENS will replace some cells we lost and thus make part of our brain partly an impostor)

The synthetic neuron may change but it doesn't get any of the original neuron's consciousness. The original is either still present with the copy elsewhere or the original is ripped out.

Then you'd have the windows closed so that the tiny amount of heat that does come in through a well-insulated house, can go into the ground which is always the annual average temperature.

There you'd have the windows closed all the time, and not insulate underneath your house (in Norway we also insulate under the house). The ground under the house is the yearly average temperature (day and night).

Which is also why geothermal will be important. Both as a place to put the heat from the AC, and in colder climates as a way to have a constant temperature to pick up heat from (a heat pump is just an AC unit that has the hot side inside instead of outside).

>Like I said
>
>Aren’t we formed through mostly atoms.
>
>Without them we wouldn’t exist.

And neither would evil...

So like I said.

If god made a universe with no life in it.

There would be no evil there.

THAT God would be good.

That's what I said in the first comment. Its completely pointless to talk about a "Good God" when clearly, evil CAN exist in the universe he allegedly made.

Top tip; Insulation helps with heat. IIRC its a very recent development that California added any real insulation to building codes.

Good insulation is the only reason AC units are so rare in Norway, because in summer when its really hot (well, hot for us) we just close our windows in the morning (having been open all night) so we keep the night cold inside and heat outside through the day until it starts cooling down outside.

You need atoms to have ambition.....

This whole conversation has certainly given me hardship, because nothing you say is consistent.

First you say evil can exist without atoms but then you say evil is created by an organism.

And the words "example particles" doesn't even make a complete sentence. I can't read your mind! What does that mean!?

Scenario A: Replace neurons one by one.

Scenario B: Copy neurons one by one, put keep the original each time.

In the first scenario you simply gradually kill the original, and in the second one you end up two minds.

>Our body is a ship of Theseus many times over, your cells function, die, and get replaced with new cells on and on.

Yes, so some part of your body died yesterday.

>Neuron replacement is different only so much that neurons typically do not get replaced once the brain is fully grown. But the process would be no different than the natural replacement of your blood every few days, the replacement of your skeleton every 15 years, or the replacement of your skin every few weeks.

Yes, so some part of your mind died yesterday.

A few brain cells were added also, but you will eventually lose enough cells to get a Parkinson's diagnosis. That is why it is currently in human trial to replace said lost cells; everyone will suffer from Parkinson's sooner or later.

The first symptoms that can't be ignored tend to appear starting when about 1 in 2 cells in the substantia nigra portion of the brain have stopped functioning properly.

By comparison we diagnose cancer when only 1 out of 37 200 cells in the body are dividing without there being a need for them to divide.

This isn't technophobia, its information physics. Whenever your computer "moves" information, it reads it, writes it in another location, then you either write random information over the original OR you keep the original.

When you "upload" to the cloud, you read the original information, it is sent as signals through wires to a computer that writes it, and then your original information is either kept or written over.

Moving information from one medium to another is a completely fantastical concept that doesn't exist even on a subatomic level. You can't move any mind or even a computer program from one to another, you can only read and write it. Which copies it.

Think about it, how do you make a copy neuron? By taking a 3D photograph of the original neuron. Then you print a 3D copy, and then you have two choices:

1. Stick the copy neuron in another new titanium skull. Keeping the original where it is.
2. Rip out the original neuron and throw it out in the garbage, and stick the new neuron in its place.

Are you a photograph of yourself? Because that is literally what these copy neurons will be. However they are done, in our universe the information in your brain cannot be moved to another. It can be copied, yes, but never MOVED.

And yes that means as we replace lost cells to cure Parkinson's, we will gradually die, and some gradually increasing impostor will take our place. And that's the best we can hope for. So save those neurons, binge-drinking and blows to the head are bad.

>That argument relies on the assumption that the individual components of one’s consciousness cannot be replaced

No, the point is you can keep the original components, and end up with two consciousnesses.

Its hard to argue that your copy is your uploaded self when you, the original, is still there if you only kept the original parts instead of throwing them out with the trash. Isn't it?

The only reason it gives you a headache is because you aren't systematic about it.

How about you imagine it with a caravan instead of a brain.

If you add to a caravan, but then detach the original from the addition, and build a copy of the original in its place, then the original caravan never went anywhere. Did it?

Which is absolutely wrong. Ship of Theseus is always wrongly presented, what if you just keep the original pieces and end up with two ships? I go through a better thought-experiment here: https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/yxxlul/comment/iwu1p5k/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

Wanna bet? https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/yxxlul/comment/iwu1p5k/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3