Otherwise we have a random universe, which does not seem to be the case.

What is that sufficient for?

>Otherwise we have a random universe, which does not seem to be the case.

Why jump to randomness, rather than to the possibility of undiscovered laws?

The key to seeing the light is not to try convincing yourself that complex number are "real", but to truly understand how ALL numbers are abstractions. This has indeed been a perspective that has broadened my understanding of math as a whole.

Reflect on the fact that negative numbers, fractions, even zero, were once controversial and non-intuitive, the same as complex are to some now.

Even the "natural" numbers are only abstractions: they allow us to categorize by quantity. No one ever saw "two", for example.

Another thing to think about is the very nature of mathematical existence. In a certain perspective, no objects cannot exist in math. If you can think if an object with certain rules constraining it, voila, it exists, independent of whether a certain rule system prohibit its. All that matters is that we adhere to the rule system we have imagined into being. It does not exist in a certain mathematical axiomatic system, but then again axioms are by their very nature chosen.

Now in that vein here is a deep thought: I think free will exists just because we can imagine a math object into being that is neither caused nor random. No need to know how it exists, the important thing is, assuming it exists, what are its properties?

Numbers are not "real", they just happen to be isomorphic to all things that are infinite in nature. That falls out from the isomorphism between countable sets and the natural numbers.

You'll often hear novices referencing the 'reals' as being "real" numbers and what we measure with and such. And yet we categorically do not ever measure or observe the reals at all. Such thing is honestly silly. Where on earth is pi on my ruler? It would be impossible to pinpoint... This is a result of the isomorphism of the real numbers to cauchy sequences of rational numbers and the definition of supremum and infinum. How on earth can any person possibly identify a physical least upper bound of an infinite set? The only things we measure with are rational numbers.

People use terms sloppily and get themselves confused. These structures are fundamental because they encode something to do with relationships between things

The natural numbers encode things which always have something right after them. All things that satisfy this property are isomorphic to the natural numbers.

Similarly complex numbers relate by rotation and things satisfying particular rotational symmetries will behave the same way as the complex numbers. Thus we use C to describe them.

As a Zen Koan:

A novice asks "are the complex numbers real?"

The master turns right and walks away.

I think it’s modern science’s use of math that made people forget this.

Lovecraft captured well that feeling with Cosmic Horror. But, you know, in the 20's, 30's, 40's, scifi writters evolved. Outdated, romantic foes (specially the French and German romanticism) keep bitching over and over about the pure and 'simple' past, as if the universe had a meaning per se. And they are utterly lost. Forever.

Archimedes and Euclides won over Aristotle. Guess why. Math itself it's the Logos.

Can you? I can only imagine world_state(t + ε) = f(world_state(t), true_random_number_source). And even in that case we do not know if such a thing as true_random_number_source exists. The future state is either a deterministic function of the current state or it is independent of it, of which we can think as being a deterministic function of the world state and some random numbers from a true random number source. Or a mixture of the two, some things are deterministic, some things are random.

But neither being deterministic nor being random qualifies as free will for me. I get the point of compatibilists, we can define free will as doing what I want, even if that is just a deterministic function of my brain state and the environment, and sure, that kind of free will we have. But that is not the kind of free will that many people imagine, being able to make different decisions in the exact same situation, i.e. make a decision, then rewind the entire universe a bit, and make the decision again. With a different outcome this time but also not being a random outcome. I can not even tell what that would mean. If the choice is not random and also does not depend on the prior state, on what does it depend?

The closest thing I can imagine is your brain deterministically picking two possible meals from the menu based on your preferences and the environment respectively circumstances, and then flipping a coin to make the final decision. The outcome is deterministically constraint by your preferences but ultimately a random choice within those constraints. But is that what you think of as free will? The decision result depends on you, which option you even consider, but the final choice within those acceptable options does not depend on you in any way and you therefore have no control over it.

Not sure what you mean here, but non-random + non-caused is the very definition of free will. It is closely bound up with the problem of consciousness, because we need to define the "you" that has free will. It is certainly not your individual brain cells nor your organs.

But irrespective of what you define "you" to be, free will is the "you"'s ability to choose, influenced by prior state but not wholly, and also not random.

And, No, I am not talking about compatibilism.

Now describe something that is non-random and not-caused. I argue there is no such thing, i.e. caused and random are exhaustive just as zero and non-zero are, there is nothing left that could be both non-(zero) and non-(non-zero). Maybe assume such a thing exists, how is it different from caused things and random things?

[...] free will is the "you"'s ability to choose, influenced by prior state but not wholly, and also not random.

I am with you until including influenced by prior state but not wholly but what does and also not random mean? It means it depends on something, right? Something that forced the choice, otherwise it would be random and we do not want that. But just before we also said that it does not wholly depend on the prior state, so what gives?

I can only see one way out, it must depend on something that is not part of the prior state. But are we not considering everything in the universe part of the prior state? Does the you have some state that the choice can depend on but that is not considered part of the prior state of the universe? How would we justify that, leaving some piece of state out of the state of the universe?

That's my point. The fail to exist only in a certain axiomatic system that is familiar to us. But in a certain mathematical/platonic sense there is nothing essential about that axiomatic system.

So your non-random + not-caused just says non-(non-determined) and non-determined. Now you have to pick a fight with the law of excluded middle [2]. You are saying that there exists a thing that has some property but also does not have that property. Do you see the problem? Nothing makes sense anymore, having a property no longer means having a property, everything starts falling apart.

Maybe you can resolve that problem in a clever way, but you will have to do a lot more work than saying there is some axiomatic system where this is not an issue. Which one? Or at least a proof of existence? And even if you have one, does it apply to our universe?

[1] Things may also seem random because you do not have access to the necessary state, for example a coin flip is not truly random, you just do not have detailed enough information about the initial state to predict the outcome. Or you may not know the laws or have the computing power to use the laws and that bares you from seeing the deterministic truth behind something seemingly random. But all those cases are not true randomness, they are just ignorance making things look random.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_excluded_middle

Then, you are also right that semantics intertwine with logic in a way that needs careful interrogation and is open to different perspectives. I'd be very careful making the leap you make from:

> non-random + not-caused

to:

> non-(non-determined) and non-determined.

Your arguments also contain an interesting thing to think about: True randomness. If you really think about it, true randomness should not exist. And yet we think radioactive decay at the quantum level is truly, fundamentally, irreducibly random. If that is so, here is an example of things happening that we, by definition, cannot explain in any more fundamental way.

Which is to say, the universe is not bound by the logic of our experience. In the same way we had to break out of our basic intuition about numbers to create new ones that gave us more power, in the same way we could never have logically reasoned our way into quantum mechanics and needed experimental evidence to accept something so radical, yes in the same way math does not care that our minds/logic is currently too weak to conceive of a mechanism for free will.

Here is mind twister for you: Imagine a chain of antecedents for an action. In our intuition, the chain stretches backwards infinitely. But what is it could somehow wrap around to form a ring at infinity? Analogous to the way cosmologists think the universe is not infinite in all dimensions

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_noncontradiction

You can absolutely be deterministic and still believe you have free will.

It is partly also due to all the guns and the shooting-obsessed culture, folks. The way people are quick to use guns is not normal. I was shocked by the recent ICE shootings.

And the fact the woman was of an ethnicity most associate with crime didn't help either, I daresay. The man probably had his biases confirmed and resorted to deadly violence without much tought.

I feel like I’m missing something here. What ethnicity? And why do “most” associate it with crime?

Have you heard about the Epstein files? Was that a failure of multiculturalism?

Not only that, some people from western cultures are also preying on poor women in 3rd world countries with sex tourism.

Western cultures are supporting the rape of resources and corruption in poor countries around the world.

Capitalism, as practiced in western cultures, is in many ways a sad scam that leads to a lot misery for a lot of people.

These are just a few examples to show: all cultures have bad in them. No culture is good

PS: The west - is no longer important though, the middle east is going to blow itself up, the far-east is where the futuri is at.

Because mixing company and personal accounts might not be a good idea.

Does it somehow gain some superpower from being left alone?

Gemini CLI (not the model) is trash, I wish it weren't so, but I only have to try to use for a short time before I give up. It regularly retains stale file contents (even after re-prompting), constantly crashes, does not show diffs properly, etc, etc.

I recently tried OpenCode. It's got a bit better, but I still have all kind of API errors with the models. I also have no way to scroll back properly to earlier commands. Its edit acceptance and permissions interface is wonky.

And so on. It's amazing how Claude Code just nails the agentic CLI experience from the little things to the big.

Advice to agentic CLI developers: Just copy Claude Code's UX exactly, that's your starting point. Then, add stuff that make the life of user even easier and more productive. There's a ton of improvements I'd like to see in Claude Code:

- I frequently use multiple sessions. It's kinda hard to remember the context when I come back to a tab. Figure out a way to make it immediately obvious.

- Allow me to burn tokens to keep enough persistent context. Make the agent actually read my AGENTS.md before every response. Ensure thew agents gets closer and closer to matching the way I'd like it work as the sessions progresses (and even across sessions).

- Add a Replace tool, like the Read tool, that is reliable and prevents the agent from having to make changes manually one by one, or worse using sed (I've banned my agents from using sed because of the havoc they cause with it).

What? Its not even the best experience. The best UX is done by Crush. and they nail the experience, but its slightly worse because they made it work for all models.

Specifically, do people not use websites that have rich/complex data driven functionality anymore?

If they do, I'm wondering what determines whether an application is seen as needing a mobile app vs being ok as a regular web app.