you have no free will.

By jp 04 Dec 2000

I was reading wired’s article on modern day supercomputers, and I got me brain to thinking about modeling. so given atomic cordinates, and the exact solute conditions and temps, you can effectivel model the behavior of organic and inorganic compounds to about 100% accuracy given the right data. and this with no more than a first-gen pentuim or eqivilent. so in the course of studying for my final, I get to wondering where it will end when the chips get big enough.

example. a virus has no free will. there are no genes to respond to envrionmental cues until after host infect. so all that cool syringe action DNA injection you see is purely thermodynamic, just as reliable as dropping a rock above your foot leading to broken toes. it just happens as soon as it binds a bacteria without requiring any energy. so we can model, given the exact coordinates, concentrations of viriods and substrates (bacteria) the behavior of the viruses. you’d need a slightly bigger computer.

now. move on to prokaryotes. a bacteria is technically an input-response machine. they “sense” the environment around them and respond through chemical cascades to response to the environment in a seeminly intellingent manner. penicillin got you down? no sweat, just make some drug-pumps to zap it out. it seems intelligent to us cause it’s what we’d do, given the choice. but in evolutionary terms, it was just the smart thing to do, so it stuck. but this raises the question, can we model something like an E. coli or a yeast? i think so. we know everything that would happen. it’s just a spankload more atoms to keep track of. need a slightly bigger computer.

so then what about us? given the world’s biggest computer from dimension X, shouldn’t we be able to effectively model humans? if we track every interaction they have with every single environmental stimulus (heat, cold, how much, how long) every toxin and ligand (EtOH, cholera toxin, influenza, etc) and every social interaction, and we know the exact celluar, developmental and nuerochemical cascades they bring about, can’t you predict this model’s behavior with some degree of accuracy?

so the question arises, if we can model this sort of system, does that mean we’ve created an AI, or that we’ve crushed the notion that people have free will? I kinda like the idea that we’re just overly complex stim-response machines. given the media you’re grown in, pardon the pun, it seems reasonable that we should know how any given person “thinks” on the atomic/molecular level, and therefore acts.

or at least it’d make me feel better when I do things and don’t know why I did them.