You'd think that, wouldn't you? Yet here I am, someone who grew up thinking computers were obtuse and boring because getting the computer to do anything interesting seemed like it would require knowing a thousand things not related to the issue at hand. I was always a mechanically minded person, so while the inner workings of things seemed interesting, making toy websites (the entry level computer thing to do in that time period) seemed about as interesting as watching paint dry.
But here I am, working as a software engineer and half way through my MSc in computer science. It took a couple of low level microcontroller classes in my mechanical engineering undergrad for me to see the light.
I get the feeling that the world was significantly more open to kids growing up with access to computers in the 80s and 90s, because as someone whose formative years were the 00s and early 10s, the interesting bits of technology were already buried under a thousand layers of abstraction and indirection. Kids nowadays won't ever learn what a shell is unless they go out of their way to learn it for some reason.
And they did that because it makes sense from a military perspective, not because they were aping go strategies. Are you being obtuse on purpose? You're taking two radically different problem domains and producing a shaky, extremely high level mapping between some elements in them that is essentially unfalsifiable.
I said nothing of qualia. Science has no tools to even begin trying to model, describe or explain them. All I am saying is that from a physical perspective, a mind is just as deterministic as an orbit. So far nobody has discovered anything to suggest otherwise. You're taking a concept that exists outside the conceptual space of physics and using it to make statements about physical systems.
Getting it out there. If your goal is just to ensure that a well supported open source solution exists and people can use it instead of having nothing at all or only paid proprietary garbage, a permissive license makes far more sense.
If your goal is sticking it to the man and demolishing capitalism or whatever then it's different of course.
>You can show all sorts of chemical and biological explanations for the behavior, but it is still "behavior." It can be predictable, but it is not deterministic.
What makes it non-deterministic? A neural network is a system with a huge number of parameters and therefore a wildly chaotic output, but the output is still deterministic. Even if you introduce a number of environmental confounders.
To claim that brains are (more) non-deterministic (than other kinds of macroscopical physical processes) you would have to show that quantum effects have a (more) significant impact on their outcomes.
> Though I think that's mostly on Google "optimizing" my queries by dumbing them down.
I'd say it's become a lot worse than it was just a couple years ago when you could massage the queries to get you exactly what you want. Now google seems to think it's more clever than you and turns every question into an entry level one.
That would be true if said intelligent people were optimizing exclusively for the metric you're looking at right now. In reality they usually are not, as they are themselves stuck in a system where their incentives are to optimize for things other than their supposed mission statement.
The world is full of tangled messes where everybody is acting with respect to their own local incentives and everyone is worse off as a result