Yes, it is possible that any two 50-sequence patterns are actual rng. But some of them are much more likely, and we can tell.

It is one thing to avoid sycophancy, but Gemini often seems to go well beyond that.

How, precisely, are you linking information theory to this?

I didn’t claim a side for you, you created that. From my perspective it is one system. Right now you are behaving as a person running an incentivized and specialized negentropic process. You are unknowingly chasing theological propositions and claiming victory every time the perspective can be durably shifted.

To move it back into a more familiar frame: theology loads in the low res view and you claim victory while most of what you did was disaggregate pixel values, but collectively a lot of people like you can form new more accurate images in certain parts of the low res view.

While you move through doing that, though, adjacent areas open up where you have no purchase, religion steps in again, and the process repeats.

There is a core that doesn’t disaggregate. That is where the pixels are coming from. That is what you cannot see when all you want is higher resolution.

How do you propose causation emerges exactly? You are a kind of relationist?

You seem to be conflating “doesn’t have reasons” with “is random” because your basis seems be something like a relational rationalist perspective, which I don’t know of as a thing that exists. I don’t believe I have encountered it before.

I can see that some aspects of your perspective make sense, but I don’t see how the aggregate holds together.

edit: I forgot to answer “how so”: your argument against free will seems to be that any choice is in response to a cause, and causes infinitely regress, therefore free will cannot exist.

Both move the choice (or the cause), out of you or me and into the origin of existence. It doesn’t cease to exist, really, it just moves. But your argument, used to argue for the lack of existence of choice, can be used to argue for the lack of existence of cause, because every cause is caused. The term becomes meaningless then, one static continuation.

My argument is that the infinite regress ends in you (and me), because of the details of our construction.

Starbuck collected data and William James turned the data into a compelling book, The Varieties of Religious Experience. Varieties draws on Starbuck's questionnaire data and names him dozens of times. Some of James’ main arguments were:

1) Against "medical materialism": a belief's origins don't settle its value. If Paul's vision is discredited by its physiology, so is the materialist's own conviction.

2) Mystical states: they carry authority for those who have them but don't bind others. Still, they break ordinary rational consciousness's claim to be the only authoritative kind. The sheer numbers of these, and the intact they have on healthy peoples’ lives, make it hard to argue rationally on an empirical basis that there is nothing there.

3) Structurally the conscious self is continuous with a "wider self" through which religious experiences come, which James calls the "more."

4) "The Will to Believe" (1896): Clifford's rule against believing on insufficient evidence is itself a personal preference, choosing to avoid error over gaining truth.

Following on that: your desire to be a reliable producer of material goods outweighs your desire to understand things that require you to take risks in assuming potentially false viewpoints. This is not common sense (whatever that means), it is an epistemological choice that seems common to you because of your educational and professional environment.

I have been working on this quite a bit, maybe I can publish it.

One challenge with your approach is that decisions are frequently (if not always) multi-causal in origin, and the balance of influence of causation must be something we can weight in real time.

The bigger basic structural idea is that closures escape causal chains, and freewill is essentially what happens within a (specific type of) causation closure.

A further problem is attempting to enclose and limit reality within logic, which we know to be a finite rule system and subject to specific limitations as such.

Further, your same argument could be used to support the idea that causation doesn’t exist.

But the more things a person must close themselves off from, the less open their consideration of possibility, the more I tend to see their worldview as subservient to something else.

In this part of society it tends to be in support of rapid, high reliability problem-solving, and rational explanation thereof.

Beniaguev, Segev & London, "Single cortical neurons as deep artificial neural networks," Neuron, 10 August 2021, Volume 109, Issue 17, pp. 2727–2739.e3 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2021.07.002 Open-access preprint: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/613141v2

Gidon et al., "Dendritic action potentials and computation in human layer 2/3 cortical neurons," Science, 367(6473), 83–87 (2020) https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aax6239

Randi, Sharma, Dvali & Leifer, "Neural signal propagation atlas of Caenorhabditis elegans," Nature, 623(7986), 2023, pp. 406–414 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06683-4 Open-access preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.04790

Neurons are not individually simple, in any sense. Nor are they the only class of cell involved in cognitive processes — glial cells are involved in inhibition, memory, network modification, etc.

This is the part you keep stating that is wrong. We know a lot about the most obvious electrical way that neurons act. That is nowhere near having a good understanding of how they work.

This does not prevent someone from building a you that runs on a faster substrate and pre running you.

It also gets into sticky territory on responsibility. Are you responsible for your choices?

You cannot choose, but you can prechoose? You cannot choose, but your physical identity chose the moment it was deterministically brought into being?

What does choice even mean in this context?