Gender
Male
About
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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"Well damn. I thought this was going to be something of a question of "does free will really exist?".
I have that problem. No joke; I have serious emotional problems over it. If someone brings up anything (or if I see anything) that even in the…"
I have that problem. No joke; I have serious emotional problems over it. If someone brings up anything (or if I see anything) that even in the…"
Free Will and Determinism: The Conflict(TL;DR: Is the universe just a computer, or is it something more?)There is an ongoing debate in physics (and somewhat in philosophy as well, as it has much relevance, I believe) about whether or not all events…
"Thanks for the replies, everyone. I guess what I need to do is just focus on what comes to me naturally. I'll still try to hold onto my computer interest, but if it gets to the point where I can't even make posts like these without getting all…"
Latest Activity
"Regarding that Canadian "retroactive hate speech law that punishes past speech and imprisons people." Does this explain why so many Canadian members of ACC, have virtually silenced their activities, here...?? And members such as John Jancar, who…"
"Betty and Barney look like they haven't slept in years-nothing but trouble from the zetas"
"More satanic filth-
Canada is veering dangerously close to the type of complete control over people’s thoughts and speech seen in places like North Korea with a new bill that aims to censor people on the pretense of protecting others from “hate…"
Canada is veering dangerously close to the type of complete control over people’s thoughts and speech seen in places like North Korea with a new bill that aims to censor people on the pretense of protecting others from “hate…"
| SourceWe live in an existence of a social engineered based culture which is steering us to an anti-human, anti-life, death culture. Until humanity has an accurate assessment of where it’s coming from we really can’t take responsibility in taking…
"The western central banking system is totally corrupt and this interview of Jared Bernstein, economic adviser to Resident Joe Biden, PROVES IT.....Just listen to this hapless idiot's attempts, to explain why the US Government chooses to borrow, if…"
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. ;-)