trickykitty | Things Change

People change. People are always changing, but not in the way that you think. Our brains are pattern recognizers and responders, nothing more and nothing less. We can recognize a new pattern by seeing it, hearing it, being told it, thinking it. Responses to patterns either reinforce the previous pattern/response behavior or inhibit that pattern/response behavior. If it becomes hindered enough, we begin to recognize new patterns and form new responses. This is the process of change, and this change is what determines how you make choices from one moment to the next.

Yes, I am of the deterministic camp, in case that hadn't already been made abundantly clear. I don't believe you have a soul. You just have interesting programming, and that's what makes me want to converse with you. Likewise, there are many people on this planet that have very dull programming, and as such, I do not find their presence in my life very enriching*.

The choices you make, whether it be about what to eat for dinner, how you tie your shoes, or what religion (or lack thereof) you will follow, are all based on your programming. However, this thought scares so many people. They simply refuse to believe that they have no control, that their choices from one moment to the next are deterministic, not to mention that the rational mind (which always processes data AFTER decisions have been made) always manages to give creative meaning and purpose to decisions, thereby furthering the belief that the decision was consciously made.

Why the fear of accepting that we are programmed? "Fear or revere me, but please think I'm special." To say something is programmed, to say something is deterministic, is interpreted as equivalently saying something is not special. This is a false interpretation. Its corollary is that there's no way an A.I. system could ever be [thinking/conscious/special], because it's programmed - this is also a false premise.

The reason that despite the deterministic nature of your brain you are still a special entity, is that I can no more predict what choice you will make from one moment to the next than a meteorologist can predict the exact weather or a particle physicist can predict the exact location of an electron flying around in its shell about the nucleus of an atom.

If you are reading this and you are not intimately familiar with the concepts of chaos theory, Lorenz attractors, the butterfly effect, and the effects of observing a system on the system itself, then the previous paragraph may not make much sense to you. Suffice it to say, prediction of a significantly large, yet still deterministic system (of which the brain, the weather, and electron patterns of travel are all members) is actually significantly weak.

You, for the most part, are slightly predictable on a grand scale. This is how we are able to socially get along and generally predict say someone's mood, or how they might respond to good or bad news. This fact alone is what keeps psychologists in business. However, it's a highly limited level of predictability (ask any psychologist). I cannot possibly know what you are thinking right at this moment, nor what you will say or do in the next. This makes you interesting (unless you're one of the dull people I mentioned earlier). This makes you unpredictable, despite being deterministic.

This makes you unpredictable even to yourself.

Go start up a chat with the Jabberwock chat bot. It's completely programmed. It's completely deterministic. You could request to see all of the lines of code that makes it up, as well as its memory system (which is still more than you can see with any human brain). Yet even still, you would be hard pressed to predict the next line that it will say in chat with you. You would in fact have to go through all those lines of code in that one instant after hitting enter and process through the program in order to predict with 100% certainty it's next response. That's 1000s of lines of code to manually process through, who knows how many man hours for you to actually process through it, all to predict it's one next line of response. What would be the point of that when you could otherwise just let it spit out it's next line of response in mere seconds for you to read? You will know 100% what it's response is if you just let it respond.

Yes, if we could map into a computer one person's brain in one instant of a moment, every single neuron, every single molecule of neurotransmitter and their exact locations in the brain, every single of the BILLIONS of connections that exist between each neuron, we could trudge through and get a 100% predictability on that person's exact next response to a stimulus. The fastest computers on the face of the planet 100 years from now would still take lifetimes to process through that much data to spit out an answer. However, we don't even have a way to view all the connections, all the molecules of the brain in one exact instant. Our best technology gives us slices of the brain in seemingly macroscopic images when compared to the individual molecules that make up the brain, and each sliver of image is still off by enough microseconds that there's no way in hell to get an image of the brain in ONE EXACT INSTANT of time.

The idea that I could EVER predict even with some small level of certainty your next response is eons away from being a reality. Your brain is deterministic. Your choices are made for you before your rational mind ever gets a hold of them to make sense out of them. And yet, you are a special, unpredictable being - no soul required.

* My life is enriched by the diversity all around me, including that of the dull folks. Still, that doesn't mean that I want to spend hours upon hours in dull discussions with them when there are other less dull people around. I <3 my friends.

Every so often, a dull person will say something interesting. I just hate having to trudge through so much dullery (yes, I just made up that word), in order to find such gems. I've been trying to see people as less dull, but it requires a lot of effort.