[tananan]

> Unless you believe in determinism and an overseeing god

Or perhaps, determinism and mechanistic materialism - which in STEM-adjacent circles has a relatively prevalent adherence.

Worldviews which strip a human being of agency in the sense you invoke crop up quite a lot today in such spaces. If you start of adopting a view like this, you have a deflationary sword which can cut down most any notion that's not mechanistic in terms of mechanistic parts. "Meaning? Well that's just an emergent phenomenon of the influence of such and such causal factors in the unrolling of a deterministic physical system."

Similar for reasoning, etc.

Now obviously large swathes of people don't really subscribe to this - but it is prevalent and ties in well with utopian progress stories. If something is amenable to mechanistic dissection, possibly it's amenable to mechanistic control. And that's what our education is really good at teaching us. So such stories end up having intoxicating "hype" effects and drive fundraising, and so we get where we are.

For one, I wish people were just excited about making computers do things they couldn't do before, without needing to dress it up as something more than it is. "This model can prove a set of theorems in this format with such and such limits and efficiency"

[exprofmaddy]

Agreed. If someone believes the world is purely mechanistic, then it follows that a sufficiently large computing machine can model the world---like Leibniz's Ratiocinator. The intoxication may stem from the potential for predictability and control.

The irony is: why would someone want control if they don't have true choice? Unfortunately, such a question rarely pierces the intoxicated mind when this mind is preoccupied with pass the class, get an A, get a job, buy a house, raise funds, sell the product, win clients, gain status, eat right, exercise, check insta, watch the game, binge the show, post on Reddit, etc.

[Quekid5]

> If someone believes the world is purely mechanistic, then it follows that a sufficiently large computing machine can model the world

Is this controversial in some way? The problem is that to simulate a universe you need a bigger universe -- which doesn't exist (or is certainly out of reach due to information theoretical limits)

> ---like Leibniz's Ratiocinator. The intoxication may stem from the potential for predictability and control.

I really don't understand the 'control' angle here. It seems pretty obvious that even in a purely mechanistic view of the universe, information theory forbids using the universe to simulate itself. Limited simulations, sure... but that leaves lots of gaps wherein you lose determinism (and control, whatever that means).

[HDThoreaun]

Choice is over rated. This gets to an issue Ive long had with Nozicks experience machine. Not only would I happily spend my days in such a machine, Im pretty sure most other people would too. Maybe they say they wouldnt but if you let them try it out and then offered them the question again I think theyd say yes. The real conclusion of the experience machine is that the unknown is scary.

[fire_lake]

> Agreed. If someone believes the world is purely mechanistic, then it follows that a sufficiently large computing machine can model the world---like Leibniz's Ratiocinator.

I don’t think it does. Taking computers as an analogy… if you have a computer with 1GB memory, then you can’t simulate a computer with more than 1GB memory inside of it.