Conjecture Institute

Register for our upcoming online conference When: June 17th Advances in Physics Attendees are welcome to ask questions, and all those who register are free to come and go as they please. The event will be recorded and posted on YouTube. conjectureinstitute.org/events/advance…

7. Brief Thoughts on Determinism and Free Will by Conjecture Institute Fellow @Sam_kuyp ​The laws of physics determine the history of the universe given initial conditions. But the initial conditions do not have to be the initial state of the universe. The state of the world at any time, including the future, will do.  If we say that the past causes the future because of the dynamical laws, then these laws equally cause the past given the current state of the universe.  That is to say, causality is not a consequence of the dynamical laws and initial conditions. So when we invoke causality, we must be talking about something other than the dynamical laws—for example, explanations of emergent phenomena, like people. People can create new explanations of what to do next and choose between them, which makes them inherently unpredictable.  Statements like 'the laws of physics made him do this' or even 'his mind made him do this' are not good explanations of someone's behaviour. People have genuine reasons for their decisions. Sometimes people are just running on automatic, but whenever they are faced with a problem, they can be creative and invent solutions. Moreover, though problems are soluble, people can always fail to solve their problems. This ability that people have to (fail to) solve problems and make choices is what I like to call 'free will'.  If this definition does not map onto your notion of free will, then we can call it something else. It's just a word. But that is not an argument against any of the above. thecriticalrationalist.weebly.com/blog/brief-tho…

6. Determinism and Free Will by Conjecture Institute Fellow @maria__violaris Why determinism is compatible with free will: No one can predict your decisions without creating a perfect simulation of you that would itself exercise the free will required to make those decisions. x.com/maria__violari…

Physics, Philosophy, and Free Will 🧵 Some resources from Conjecture Institute affiliates👇

Watch Conjecture Institute Advisor @yudapearl's talk 2012 ACM A.M. Turing Award Lecture "The Mechanization of Causal Inference" youtube.com/watch?v=iNm4nF…

The Ladder of Causality 1. Observational Questions: 'What if we see A?' 2. Action Questions: 'What if we do A?' 3. Counterfactual Questions: 'What if we did things differently?' ~Conjecture Institute Advisor @yudapearl

Listen to the entire conversation between Conjecture Institute Fellow @dela3499 and Ambassador @ToKTeacher YouTube youtube.com/watch?v=X61kFj… Podcast conjectureinstitute.podbean.com/e/ep-6-carlos-…

The Ecosystem View of the Mind A mind is a bunch of ideas all affecting each other, like an ecosystem. It's unpredictable. It's not an input-output system. ~Conjecture Institute Fellow @dela3499 w/ Ambassador @ToKTeacher

Read Conjecture Institute Fellow @arjunkhemani’s essay Freedom Engineered in Code x.com/arjunkhemani/s…

Throughout history, freedom has always depended on the tools we had to protect it. The printing press made free speech possible. Before Gutenberg, ideas were chained to scribes and priests, locked away behind the authority of institutions. Printing blew apart that monopoly. Knowledge escaped. Authority collapsed under scale. The monopoly of ideas was gone forever. ~Conjecture Institute Fellow @arjunkhemani

Watch Conjecture Institute Fellow @Ray_S_Percival's documentary Liberty Loves Reason youtube.com/watch?v=81i9L0…

Language, Writing, & Criticism When we commit our idea to paper, it can be critically evaluated by others. What problems does it solve? Is it coherent? Does it enjoy some arbitrary privilege over their rivals? ~Conjecture Institute Fellow @Ray_S_Percival

Learn more about Conjecture Institute Senior Scientist Vlatko Vedral's latest book Portals to a New Reality: Five Pathways to the Future of Physics vlatkovedral.com/books/portals-…

My new book is about the next revolution in physics. It explains in an accessible manner what I believe to be five key ‘thought experiments’ that will provide us with clues about what our next fundamental laws should be like. Each central chapter is about one such experiment - its motivations and how it will allow us to open a window on the future theory of physics. ~Conjecture Institute Senior Scientist Vlatko Vedral

Listen to the entire conversation between Conjecture Institute Advisor @DavidDeutschOxf, Advisor @peterboghossian, & @ReidN Fermi Paradox, Ideological Contagion, & More youtube.com/watch?v=qPvTbf…

The Battle of Ideas and Error-Correction The society of the West is not the society that makes the right decisions all the time, it's the society that corrects errors. There is no limit to the size of error that we can make. The important thing is how good we are at correcting errors. Many non-Western societies don't try to correct errors, they want to entrench them. They don't recognize that there are going to errors in everything they do. That is their weakness. It is why we already have the tools to win the battle. We've got what it takes. ~Conjecture Institute Advisor @DavidDeutschOxf with Advisor @peterboghossian & @ReidN