@Wayfarer@jkg20:up: I'm going to stay over here in the dunce's corner, now that two more able people are here to stand in my stead. I am hoping that tom's current parading of the Deutsche principle as some kind of panacea for philosophical issues about the mind, will go the same way as his earlier parading of the Free Will Theorem (i.e. into the dustbin of irrelevance).

Most people get their information already assembled into the final shape. If you read a book from a gifted author, you get his ideas arranged in a final logical and coherent form. This is not how the creative process works. The front end of the creative process can be bits and pieces, scattered all over the place, that may not seem to connect, until the author makes the final pass.

In school, you may learn science that is finalized and arranged in a logical way, and then assume nature and mind is self assembling. This does not tell anything about the creative trial and error of the development stage. It tells nothing of all the bad experiments, dead ends and eureka moments, that lead to the final version.

Willpower and evolution of ideas and things occurs mostly in the front end that is hidden from most people. Creative can skip step which are filled in later, for others. Yet people discuss choice in terms of the final product, where it is not as needed.

Your original question was "So you don't think that humans are finitely realizable physical systems?" responding "No" to that question does not entail that MN thinks that humans are not finitely realizable physical systems - it's a subtlty concerned with the scope of negation which may have escaped you. He may believe, for instance, that the notion of a finitely realizable physical system, or indeed even the notion of a human being, is not clear enough to be able to reach any reasonable conclusion concerning whether one is an instance of the other or not, and in which case the reasonable position is probably to suspend judgement. — jkg20

I'm sure the damsel in distress is grateful for your white-knighting, but if someone declares that humans are not finite physical systems, then I prefer to take them at their word.

Recourse to semantics is often available if you wish to squirm out of a corner, but in this case it is not. The meanings of "finite" and "physical" are precise.

I would have preferred if this nonsense position had been made clear from the start.

It is interesting to note, that the gradual, incremental process of evolution has produced at least two universal leaps.

Initially the genetic code itself was subject to natural selection. It was varying along with the phenotype, and at some point switched from RNA to DNA encoding.

Then something remarkable happened - the code itself stopped evolving, but the phenotype did not. This change occurred when life was no more than single-celled organisms, but has created the biodiversity we have today. Somehow the particular encoding achieved universality in its domain.

The second leap we know of is the leap to universality of the human brain. There are ideas of the selective pressures that favoured efficient knowledge transfer, and in keeping with the gradualism of evolutionary theory, the phenotypical changes resulting in a computationally universal brain may be relatively small.

I'm going to investigate this, but I think the changes Babbage made to the design of his Difference Engine (not computationally universal) to create his Analytic Engine (computationally universal) were relatively modest.

The existence of free-will is of course contentious, but the fact that the creation, transfer, and application of knowledge, not encoded in the genome, may confer a survival advantage, seems uncontentious.

Of course if you think humans are not finite physical entities, you'll probably disagree.

I wonder about linking Rosen's Paper :

The most natural approach to take seems to be the following: let f:A —> *B be an arbitrary mapping. If f is to be physically realizable, it is no restriction to take A and B to be countable sets.

The realization Rosen talks about is not a system that operates on symbols but is a "mapping" like you take 10 baskets, put a few apples into each and then have realized the first 10 members of it. Using the laws of mathematics to manipulate symbol-systems is very different from this. A computer printing the infinity-symbol on a sheet of paper is not a realization of infinity.

'Free will is based on 2-D thinking'. I'm very unclear as to how you are using 'free-will' in this context. Your association with 'knowledge of good and evil' was a wonderful insight for me!
I understand how you have described it in evolutionary terms, but you come out having a 'negative' view of free-will, and I don't follow why.

Firstly I'd like to say hello to all here, so hello. I'm a newbie, six hours or so.. forgive my punctuation or lack their of. Iv never studied philosophy, or in school anyways, but I think freewill's main objective is the ability to take or not to take someone else's life by choice. If you weren't able to do this because you yourself would automatically blow up at the mere thought of taking someone's life then wouldn't we be governed in a really obvious way. For me this is where freewill shows all its cards. In saying this iv enjoyed reading everyone's thoughts on the topic, not that I understand everything completely.

No absolute free will can exist, perhaps it is coded in our DNA to perform our actions, like main ones are survival, love, sex etc. What all are basic human needs. And it doesn't seem like they are related to "free will". I see human, or all living species as Locke did "tabula rasa", what means blank painting, and our actions will draw it, when you example are born in to "higher class", then you background, makes you act by what your class is supposed to. And in general we seem to learn our morals off society, parents, and people we are with.

Free will is problematic, with neurosis such as mental problems, and diseases, like Alzheimer, depression, addiction, etc. Our "free will" seems to be determined by our state of health. And in neurosciences, everything is detected to actions of our brains, and brain cells. And perhaps in daily lives to our cognitive-skills, such as, knowledge/experience, what determine our thoughts.

Not sure I follow you batsushi7, what is absolute freewill in you're opinion? I know it's off topic but I'm intrigued by your profile name? Batsushi7? Cool name, what's it inspired by? It seems very suggestive

Iv heard that people eating dead bats in China is what started the whole corona virus. But you can never believe totally what you hear I suppose