I currently know how to do the following things:
@discobot start {name-of-tutorial}
Starts an interactive tutorial just for you, in a personal message.
{name-of-tutorial}can be one of:tutorial, advanced tutorial.
@discobot roll 2d6
3, 6
@discobot quote
If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough. — Albert Einstein
@discobot fortune
You may rely on it
“Norman - coordinate”
No less than Descartes himself suggested a similar framework for the brain, comparing the mind to novelty mechanical toys nobles often gifted to each other. It would be charitable to call it an “imprecise metaphor” and the materialist/computation hypothesis is no different. It’s a metaphor, but not a particularly accurate or informative one. The brain is so fundamentally different, architecturally, than any computer that the only way you can map one to the other is with such vague, overarching metaphors that have zero practical educational or even philosophical value.
There isn’t a switch analog in the brain, nor is there logic circuits or storage. Your memory is intertwined with your beliefs, even your current mood. Not only will a brain operate differently each time its given similar inputs, your memory of the decision changes each time you recall it. It is as far from the precise, repeatable clockwork of a computer as you can get.
Why would a sentient AI ever even come about? Even the materialist argument says consciousness is an emergent phenomenon of the brain, but since we do not build computers that are anything like the brain, why assume self-awareness would emerge from it?
It is far, far more likely that AI will develop as a stack of loosely coupled nodes, taking inputs, passing along outputs, no layer ever any more aware of anything than a spreadsheet does today. The end result is just a storage and logic tool, like every other computer before it. Bug testing would certainly be much easier.
Those AI’s certainly do suck at the details, don’t they? They think a hand has somewhere between 1 and a dozen fingers each (and that there is minimal correlation between the fingers on the left and right hands). Also that each eye socket contains somewhere between zero and N eyes. And that’s after being fed more photos than any human could ever look at in their life. Also, they’re quite derivative if I can be a snob for a moment.
Having dabbled with these tools a bit, I’ve concluded they’re just that: tools. They’re no more a threat to artists than photography was. Because they spit out mountains of crap. Only skilled keywords, plus extensive skimming through the results, and even then, a run through Photoshop will get you something reasonably free of horrific flaws. It could save a digital artist some time, but not that much.
I certainly did not intend to go this far/deep, but I’m truly enjoying the discourse.
Does this not prove that free will exists in so much as every entity will experience the environment differently, therefore building a different set of facts that any other entity, eventually forcing the situation where two entities faced with the same exact choice will chose differently?
And that Choice itself is the act of contemplating the facts at hand combined with previous experiences in a manner (based on the concept of morals?) shaped by previous decisions and the evaluation of those outcomes (good or bad, the post analysis is also data)? Where the outcome of that contemplation is neither fixed nor guaranteed but fully dependent on the current, unique situation (as a combination of circumstance, dilemma, and historical data which can never be repeated) ?
(I feel this might be similar to the Schrödinger paradox, but that calls for a separate post)
Or, is there only freewill at the first choice, for which every other choice is simply an amalgam of previous and new data? Free choice had to exist before the first data point caused a neuron to change state and our path to be set, did it not?
I’ve really got too much to do today before I leave and I don’t want to abandon a post I created, but PTO starts tomorrow and so I hope everyone has a good time with this.
Thanks, Mike… tip the domino and then walk out of the room! 
Modis operandi!!
Haha, where else could it have gone?
There’s a 1850’s-ish quote by Émile Gaboriau something like, “I believe in God but also monsieur Voltaire, so I have nothing but enemies on both sides on Earth”
My response to every argument about free will is: Maybe, but you can’t prove it and you certainly can’t construct a society on any other assumption than we all have some level of self determination mixed with some level of happenstance. Because the alternative to that model is either anarchy or tyranny run amok.
Like this post…
Those entities might have different future states, but that was due to the different input. Not free will of thought.
And to those saying I’m comparing a bilogical brain to a digital computer, you aren’t following me. The laws of nature dictate the interaction of energy and matter. That’s the deterministic characteristic. No matter how complex your brain is, it is just the interactions matter as dictated by the laws of nature.
Rolling dice is completely deterministic. That’s not the same as being predictable. But if the conditions (initial state and inputs) are the same, the exact same outcome would happen. Same goes for biochemical reactions. Even if some random event like a cosmic ray hitting a neoron and affects the outcome of your thought process, that wasn’t you that made the different decision. It was different input (cosmic ray vs no cosmic ray) that changed the next state of the system
There is one argument for the existence of free will. But it requires abandoning science.
The existence of a soul. For which there is no scientific basis.
nor, by definition, is one needed to believe in both science (IE the ongoing analysis and understanding of all things deterministic) and one’s soul…
because you can always say not YET… 
But in fact I do believe in the soul yet I do not believe in the existence of free will… 