The gift of free will

Here is a Christmas message from Krakatoa at Ace of Spades.

My daughter is almost 4. It is a singular experience to try to explain to her why the Grinch had a change of heart upon hearing the Hoos in Hooville sing even with no presents or ornaments or trees or roast beast.

It is difficult to explain my relationship with God properly, other than to say I decided at a young age to make my way without a direct relationship with Him.

Let me also interject here: I don't mean any of this to be a theological debate; it is merely my own observations based on my own myopic existence.

I have never been angry at God, outside of what in my ignorance I took to be a betrayal that started our estrangement. Angry at myself many times thereafter, certainly: At the root of almost all anger, one must despise one's own choices that led to one's discontent, irrespective of how much one utilizes projection and displacement to alleviate one's sense of guilt.

And now my daughter goes to a Christian preschool because, my life notwithstanding, there is not another institution secular or otherwise that I would entrust her to.

So despite my spiritual distance, I do my utmost to tell her the true meaning of Christmas to the best of my ability, and why it can change even the greenest and meanest of avaricious hearts into one of forgiveness and caring and charity.

All things, good or bad, happen, period. I don't care to say they happen for a definable reason -- it seems to me such reasons are subjective at best if human constructs, and inscrutable altogether if inhuman.

What is important to me is not that we learn some absolute metaphysical truth as a consequence of some experiences, but that we are given the gift to experience an incredible spectrum of things and to then choose our own paths to reconciling those things with our conception of existence.

God, or whatever you use as an analogue short of those that demand absolute obedience, gave us the gift of free will to do precisely that.

I am reminded of that every day with my little girl, quite often to the detriment of my own blood pressure.

But there it is, and there it will always be. How we use our free will to reconcile those experiences with reality and incorporate them into our values and behavior defines the quality of our existence.

No citizens of any country in the history of mankind has enjoyed the latitude to enjoy that gift more than we in the U.S.

Enjoy the bounty that is our lives. Seize the gift and embrace both the freedom and the responsibility that gift bestows equally.

Merry Christmas, my friends.

Check your driver's license!

"One of the annoying things about believing in free will and individual responsibility is the difficulty of finding somebody to blame your problems on. And when you do find somebody, it's remarkable how often his picture turns up on your driver's license."
— P. J. O'Rourke

hat tip Proof Positive

Do we really have free will?

Scott Adams does not believe we have free will. He writes,

I would not have said this was possible five years ago. But in 2017, cognitive scientists know how to reprogram a human brain fairly effectively. They have weaponized what hypnotists have been doing for decades.

As luck would have it (sort of) we can test persuasion ideas at Guantanamo Bay without any cruelty whatsoever. There would be no hardcore “brainwashing,” just a series of pleasant experiences engineered to get a certain outcome.

The key to making all of this work is what businesses call A/B testing. The idea is that you rapidly test one approach after another until you get the best result.

I believe that current facial recognition technology can tell us how a subject is responding to a suggestion. When one approach works well, we don’t stop – we keep testing until we find the one that works best. And different approaches would work with different personality types. So we need a number of persuasion approaches. The A/B testing would be perpetual by design, so our results would improve over time. Once we can reliably reprogram the Guantanamo Bay prisoners, we take that weaponized persuasion to ISIS.

Regular readers of this blog have seen me discuss lots of examples of persuasion at work. But you haven’t seen anything yet. Your opinion of free will will evaporate in the next few years. I had that experience when I trained to be a hypnotist. Once you see a subject’s brain get reprogrammed in real time, you never believe in free will again. That’ll happen to you within five years – you will see examples of brains being reprogrammed right in front of you. The science on how to do it is super strong now. It will be everywhere. And it is totally legal. We used to call it “marketing” when it didn’t work that well. This new stuff is something else. It works so well it makes your ethical alarms go off.

I’ll make a prediction, just for fun: If President Trump orders the release of the Guantanamo Bay prisoners in 2-3 years, it won’t be as risky as you think.

Read more here.

Human decision-making...by machines!

Scott Adams asserts,

...machines will someday make all of our important decisions. We are probably less than ten years away from that.

Losing your free will to machines might sound scary. But you never had free will in the first place. It was always an illusion. When the machines take over our important decisions we will do the same thing we do now – we will imagine that we are making the decisions on our own. Today our important decisions are made with emotions, and rationalized after the fact. We incorrectly call this process “thinking.” In the near future, our machines will make our daily decisions using Big Data and whatever they know about us as individuals to maximize our outcomes. You’ll like that future because the machines will make better decisions than you, and you’ll have better quality of life.

In the new world ahead, you will be the robot – albeit a moist one. The machines will be doing the thinking and making the decisions. You will simply do what they program you to do. Like a robot. And all of that will happen before Artificial Intelligence is popular. In terms of capability, all the machines need in order to take over for human decision-making is lots of relevant data, body monitor sensors, and some pattern recognition software. We’re almost there.