Herding Cats and Free Will Inflation (2020) [pdf]
ase.tufts.edu
ase.tufts.edu
It's funny, Dennett talks about a "coin tossing machine" as a virtual impossibility, but Persi Diaconis actually had one built! It is described in this paper: https://statweb.stanford.edu/~susan/papers/headswithJ.pdf
> Physicists have calculated that if you really want to predict coin flips, you have to know the location of every electron in the visible universe and its gravitational effect on the coin.
This is not really true either. Coin tosses leak a lot of information into the physical world. For example, here is a short paper on trying to predict the outcome of a coin toss by analyzing the sound of the "ping!" it makes: https://cs.stanford.edu/~kach/can-one-hear-the-fate-of-a-coi...
The important part is that you're catching the flipped coin out of the air, rather than letting it bounce on the ground. The bounce is much less controllable than how high and how quickly you're spinning the coin - the bounce depends not only on the rotational and kinetic energy, but the exact phase angle it lands at, whereas at the end of the catch you only care about how high and quickly you flipped the coin, which can be done consistently enough by hand.
And honestly, even if they brought a machine, as long as you allow it to land without interference and call which side you want in the air, it'll end up being fine. They'd have to know which side you'd pick in order to rig it, and that's just as bad as the initial coinflip.
I fail to see why consciousness would be necessary for prediction. Any more context here?
Unless I'm showing my ignorance here, which is quite likely.
You need consciousness to “step outside” into a 3rd person or 2nd person view.
> Without consciousness you experience a single unified reality: your reality.
To me the word "experience" is what consciousness seems to be about. In that case without consciousness you can "step outside" and everything, but you would have no "internal experience" of any sort. i.e. be a "philosophical zombie" [1].
I think Coyne, Harris, et al would contest this. If someone cuts me off in traffic my first instinct is to get angry at them, to blame them and wish ill of them. But if we "rewind the tape" and it happens again and again then it's hard to rationalize my negative response. What follows is a more compassionate stance. That's pretty significant.
I think Dennett misses Harris' larger project which is to better understand ourselves and others. His meditation project, Waking Up, speaks to the very same concerns Dennett articulates in this article regarding sources of distraction like social media.
To think there is a middle ground is kidding yourself (I had no choice but to post this comment)
Just because you have strings does not mean you lack autonomy, which I agree with. There's a little bit about how chance can exist in determinism that is little more than sophistry, imo.
^this is a direct response to Sam Harris afaict
I read that bit as a really good answer to a question famously posed by Knuth: 7 is a random number iff the reasons it isn't 8 are beyond anyone's control.