Darren New wrote:
>> it can't prevent the machine from being intentionally derailed by 
>> someone else, and it doesn't have any way to predict what the final, 
>> post hock, resolution of all the steps are going to be.
> 
> Presumedly it does, or we wouldn't be saying it's the thing making the 
> decision.
> 
If not for the fact that you can map the decisions process pretty well, 
if not exactly, and there isn't any evidence of some "trigger" event.. 
Nor does there seem to be any feasible reason you need such a thing at 
all. See, the problem here is, people looking for supernatural 
explanations are trying to find "souls", pretty much by definition. We 
can make "simple" brains now, like fly intelligence, which *act* 
deterministic, *act* like they think, and *act* exactly how one of these 
"ensouled" things would, if a supernatural watzit was pushing the 
buttons, yet.. the implications if the supernatural did exist, would be 
that simply "building" something that allowed it to act like a mind 
would "attract" the supernatural, and without it, the thing would just 
sit their and do nothing. This contradicts everything we know, and 
learned, and predict, about brains, minds, thinking, and how/why any of 
it works.

Its an unnecessary addition, and it contradicts "existing" simple 
examples that we *have* replicated.

>>> I don't think you know that either. :-)  Certainly there's room for 
>>> quantum effects, even if you leave out the supernatural.
>>>
>> I think the later can be discounted pretty well.
> 
> Why? By definition, you can't discount the supernatural, *especially* in 
> something you don't understand the details for.
> 
I would argue that, in fact, we have a clear enough picture at this 
point that the odds of the supernatural being involve is... slim to 
none. I would even go so far as to say that people *researching* the 
matter would state it even more strongly, based on everything I have 
read on behavioral and the "physical" mechanics of modern neuroscience.

>> The former.. is a bit iffy, 
> 
> In what way?
> 
Answered in the other part, about ridiculous directions. But, in 
reality, at this point, it simply doesn't rise above "hypothesis". There 
being only slightly more evidence to support the assertion than their is 
for the supernatural, and then only due to there being pretty much no 
support for the supernatural, other than the persistence of people to 
insist it exists, and invent new ways to misunderstand things like 
emeters, photography, noise analysis, and random patterns on toast, to 
really support it. Hell, most of the BS people call "supernatural" is 
**known** to have been made up by con artists in the early 18th century, 
during the rise of the "spiritualist" movement. What wasn't, is a mish 
mash of re-editing of things invented by the same people that built 
"flying chariots", "doors that open on their own" and other contrivances 
for their temples to various mythological figures, which they knew damn 
well where engineered, not magicked.

As someone put it in a thread somewhere else recently, its all about the 
inane concept of "sheep and shepards". Sheep are raised to be fleeces, 
bred, so you can fleece more of them, and/or eaten. One may make up 
ghosts and spirits to fill in things one doesn't know how to explain, 
but in the end, the people that "promote them" as the best answer for 
something tend to have shears stuck in their back pockets, or are just 
some shearer's head sheep. Before you suggest the supernatural as a 
plausible explanation for *anything* you first have to show that the 
supernatural itself is at all *plausible*. Otherwise, you might as well 
suggest alien's playing video games, or Santa Claus.

So, sure, quantum effects, to explain free will, never mind having 
failed to prove you need to explain what you can't prove exists in the 
first place, is more likely, but only because Santa Claus is "still" a 
poor explanation for how presents got under your tree, even if no one in 
the family remembers putting them there. lol

-- 
void main () {
   If Schrödingers_cat is alive or version > 98 {
     if version = "Vista" {
       call slow_by_half();
       call DRM_everything();
     }
     call functional_code();
   }
   else
     call crash_windows();
}

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