h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Right. Okay then. Don't know how long I'll stick around really, I want to finish this English homework.

Fair enough. I'm sure I'll see you around soon anyway.

I gurantee it.

*walks in feeling like shes missed the party*
oh rats, i hate it when that happens. now i'm finally here and neither of you are. oh well, maybe if i'm good i can get all my work done before sunday night. then i can talk to you both
however, chances are that i'll procrastinate too much.......oh well... maybe i'll be here anyways. probably, i have absolutely no self controll when it comes to doing homework and talking to you guys.... i end up trying to do it at the same time. which maybe is a good thing. it keeps me awake enough to do the work.

I do the same thing. Kind of nice really, keeps you from getting so bored with the homework that you let your mind wander off.

I try to do the same thing, except I have to keep 'switching gears' when I go between assignments and chatting here. You've probably noticed that when it's late here and I've been doing assignments for a while, I can't really think in English all that well and my posts get a lot shorter.

I still try, though.

Which is very nice of you to do.

Well, I think it's worth it.

How are you tonight?

Pretty good!

Especially since I've finally finished all the homework I had to do....

That is I have until tomorrow morning, when I'm sure the sadistic beasts are going to give me even more......

The s.

I, on the other hand, am still working on my current assignments. This one is due in in three days and until this morning I wasn't able to test my code because it wasn't able to interface with the code I was supposed to run it with. And this morning I found out that I don't actually need to interface with that code until part two, which is why I was able to test part one today.
But now I'm up to part two, and have just hit the same problem again.

Although it looks like it was working briefly at some point, because when I run the other set of code I can see an old version of my code sitting there waiting to be used.
But now I can't make my new code talk to it without everything breaking. Again.

I'm sorry, you don't need to know all this. That's why I made that journal entry for all this rubbish.

I don't mind. I wish I could help. But I only took one semester of computer programming, and I don't think I did that well, so I doubt I'd be able to at all. Except by giving you hugs and encouragment of course.

You /did/ get it at least partly working, and you still have three days. I'm sure you'll be able to manage it.

It's midnight and I have to go to school tomorrow, so I'm going to bed now. Too bad, I would have liked to talk to you more.

As it is I'm going to leave you with a question that should keep you thinking (if not about how you feel about it, than about how to explain how you feel about it).

I understand from reading your space that you embrace the concept of Universal Determinism. So my question for you is: Why? And more importantly, in what way?

"You /did/ get it at least partly working, and you still have three days." That's true. This assignment is nowhere /near/ as complex as the last one. It's not even the same ballpark of difficulty. It's not even the same /sport/. Which is why I'm not so stressed. It's just a nuisance that I've only got three days left, and this is the first time I've actually been able to test my code.

Ang as soon as it's finished I have to leap straight into working on the other assignment for my other paper, which is due three days later and I'm way behind deadline on that one too.
But that one's even easier again. I just have to learn how to use a specific programming language which I don't know yet, and use that to take another programming language I don't know as input, and produce a third programming language which I only vaguely know, as output.

But that one's heaps easier. I'm sure I can do that in three days.


I assume you aready know about more specific concepts like behavioural determinism, but just in case I'll build up to the universal version.
Closed-system determinism has been proven to be possible, and is the position that it's possible to predict the next output from a small, closed, system (like a simulated object in a computer, for example) based on its current states and input. As a /really/ simple example, if I were to write a program which read numbers as you typed them on screen, and for every '0' you typed it would print out "Fu", and for every '1' you type it prints out "Bar", and for every other number it just prints out that number again... well you can see it wouldn't take very long for you to figure out what it does. You could predict what it will print out just by knowing what you were about to type next.
It could be made more difficult by saying that instead there was a program which would output 'fu' whenever the last two digits you typed in added to a multiple of three or something. You'd still eventually know when it was going to say 'fu' at you, although you wouldn't necessarily know that you know, or be able to explain it.
But it is still possible to accurately predict a systems outputs given its current state, and its inputs.

Behavioural determinism is that same hypothesis applied to a person - it's something I can do a lot of the time, although it's taken me a long time to be able to say /how/ I know some of the things that seem really obvious to me. Luckily, a side effect of the way that humans learn things is a tendancy to be able to say what applies in a context without it being necessary to be able to say how or why it applies.

Universal determinism is the hypothesis that this concept can be extended to the entire universe. If a hypothetical computer was built which could record the current state of every single atom absolutely everywhere, as they stand right /now/, /and/ knew all of the rules which applied to all of their movements in any and all given situations - for example there would be rules for how electrons moving through a particular set of synapses in a brain would cause the person associated with that brain to raise their arm and slap someone upside the head, which in turn would cause the other person to fall over or whatever, etc... then that computer could predict the future, right up to the end of time.

Of course, that could never happen because it assumes things like the possibility that such rules could actually be quantified and mapped into a computer, that such a computer could run so fast that it could predict more than one second into the future per second, and that the computer wouldn't have to be bigger than the universe in order to be able to store the states of every single atom in the universe...

But I believe that the argument is sound. It's just a /really/ large hypothetical searchspace. However, it has been proven to be true for small closed systems, and there's nothing stopping it being true for large closed systems too.
Small non-closed systems, by definition, aren't independant, so over time there's always going to be more and more 'noise' to the data, and the predictions would get less and less correct. But I believe this has also been done, in various contexts where it's useful to do so.

So yeah, I see no reason to believe that universal determinism might /not/ be valid.

Sleep well dude!

Makes sense.

I agree that that could be the case. But that the future can't be known with absolute certainty, because if someone knew /exactly/ how they were going to do something, then they might choose not to do it, or do it with different eyes open and closed, just to prove that they have free will. Mind you, that behavior would then be predicted as well. So yeah, maybe everything is predetermined, but even if it is then we can't know what will happen.

*shrug* Anyway......

What do you think of the concept of fate then?

"...they might choose not to do it..." - That's a separate argument; the hypothesis holds true for any closed system, and for an open system there's an increase in entropy defined by the amount of influence of entities outside the system which interact with entities inside it. So if the viewer of the predictions is part of the system themselves, then there's a type of recursive interaction which increases the amount of entropy exponentially.

There's also the question of where our concept of 'free will' comes from, and whether that can or can't be predicted. Evidence has yet to turn up either way.

What's the definition of fate?

There's no such thing as Free Will.

~*~What's the definition of fate?~*~

Predestiny?

"Fate-The inevitable or necessary fate to which a particular person or thing is destined; one's lot."

Something that you /have/ to do as part of your destiny in life.

Oh yeah, there's a posting to make here...

Yeah I don't believe that free will exists as anything more than a useful fiction; same as 'reality', really.

Not sure about fate; I don't believe that it exists, but I can't really think of why I believe that.
I suspect it's because I believe that the only thing which binds us to a particular course of action is our own personality; and therefore there's no external influence on what we can or can't do.
...Unless our personalities are forged in response to external influences, which they are anyway.
Obviously I need to think more about that one.

~*~Unless our personalities are forged in response to external influences, which they are anyway.~*~

Which is why I say there's no such thing as Free Will.

We've accepted that your personality is determined by external influences. Since those influences are caused by the actions of other people who have had their personality's determined for them in the same way, and if we also accept that your personality governs the choices and decisions you will make in your lifetime, then your entire life was decided for you before you were born and free will never comes into it for anyone. Although I suppose it depends on your definition of free will.

And that really just brings us back to Universal Determinism. Which actually makes perfect sense when you think about it, despite the Time Travel arguments.

How's this for a question then.....

Assuming we follow the model of Universal Determinism: Is it all proceeding toward one important thing, or is it just totally random and pointless on a cosmic scale?

Personally, I'll go with Random and Pointless for $500.

I believe... that I agree completely.

Although there /is/ some nagging thing in the back of my mind, but since I can't work out what it is, I'll ignore it.

As for 'random and pointless' versus 'proceeding to a point'; I think both. Let me explain...
If you're a researcher doing an experiment, let's say a psychology experiment like that rat/maze thing... Then there's both a point to the experiment, and no set direction for it to go. The process - what happens during the course of the experiment - is in many ways more important than what the result of the experiment is.

Going back to that entry I made on the hypothesis of reality; imagine that I was at the stage where I've created the robots, and programmed them; so I turn them on and let them go. Initially, I just want to see what they do; how they react to their environment, how well they learn, and so on.
I reckon that our reality is a similar experiment; a kind of simulation which may or may not have been for the amusement or education of the diety(s) who created(?) us. They just wound up the clockwork and let us go, to see what we would become.
That's what /I/ would do, if I were a god.