Gender
Male
Gender
Male
Location
Pikesville, MD
Birthday:
November 21
About Yourself
I'm basically the classic "computer geek", in that I like to tinker with computers quite a lot. In fact, I use a distribution of Linux as my primary operating system (don't worry though, I'm not all anti-Microsoft, either ;) ). But there's another side to me that I hope to be able to bring out more by having joined this site: my spiritual side. Basically, I'm in conflict with myself over the old "free will vs. predestination" debate, and it gets to me on such a deep level, that it hurts both sides of me (i.e. both my spiritual and techie side). I want to believe in true and complete freedom, but I also want to be able to expect the technology that I enjoy tinkering with to be able to function the way I expect, instead of just complete chaos, if you know what I mean by that... :\ I think I know deep inside that free will is real, but I just can't get over my notions about how computers work and how there seem to be so many analogies between that and the way the human brain/mind works. The notion of a fully "sentient" AI scares the hell out of me, let's put it that way, and not for the reasons often portrayed in science fiction stories. I want there to be some regularity to existence, but I don't want my choices to be part of that "regularity", i.e. I don't want to believe in predestination. But without predestination, then how can the world still make sense logically? I suppose you could argue that nothing absolutely has to make sense logically, but I want it to be. I want to have my computers as deterministic finite state machines, but i don't want to be a deterministic finite state machine. Can you really have your cake and eat it too in that regard? Anyways, I suppose I should wrap this up, as it's turning more into a description of my worries than my interests...
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Comments
Mostly what caught my eye was this:
"There is a misleading thought that there is a /dev/urandom on earth. I'm glad to tell you there is no such thing as /dev/urandom: this kernel was built without it. Many processes refer to that device, which in fact is not a random data generator: it's a symlink to /proc/self/ actually(it's what you've choosen or did now or in the past)."
This caught my eye because it gave me an interesting perspective on my whole free will vs. determinism conflict...
/dev/urandom is a "pseudo-file" that provides a constant stream of pseudorandom numbers under Linux and other UNIX-like operating systems. Basically my interpretation of the above statement is that the "randomness" in our world is actually not generated from something outside of us (a universal "/dev/urandom", if you will), but rather it is generated by us. We have free will. We just don't know how to fully exercise it yet. ;-)