What if you're not even determining your next move? Sabine Hossenfelder did an episode on Superdeterminism that considered this possibility - that you have no free will, that your every decision and action was fully determined at the moment of the Big Bang, and that your conscious mind is merely observing them as they happen but not actually causing them.
If that was the case, then it makes sense that we do not have free will in the Christian sense, we are not really responsible for our actions. If it isn't the case it might well mean there are things that aren't caused by anything, which would be really weird as well.
So if the behaviour of our universe can be described entirely mathematically, isn't it weird that it physically contains this comment about how we know that we're in a universe that contains non-mathematical stuff? It's of course possible. But I find it strange.
> If it isn't the case it might well mean there are things that aren't caused by anything, which would be really weird as well.
Isn't this necessarily the case for anything to exist? Is it more strange for there to be exactly one thing without a cause (the initial conditions of the universe), or for things without causes to just be a regular part of the universe we live in?
There's certainly a difference in our feelings, I'm not sure if a mathematical description of experience has to be incomplete - but I agree that all attempts of doing so have been complete failures.
> So if the behaviour of our universe can be described entirely mathematically, isn't it weird that it physically contains this comment about how we know that we're in a universe that contains non-mathematical stuff? It's of course possible. But I find it strange.
It is, but this kind of self-referential process isn't unheard of, in fact we are currently consciously discussing consciousness. A popular sentiment in some sci fi circles (fe. Babylon 5) would be to posit that life is the universe's attempt to become conscious of itself. If true, it would do worlds for us to regain the self-importance lost from Galilei and Darwin.
> Isn't this necessarily the case for anything to exist? Is it more strange for there to be exactly one thing without a cause (the initial conditions of the universe), or for things without causes to just be a regular part of the universe we live in?
You are absolutely right, I think we are generally much more used to the "first mover" concept, since it is the basis of most, if not all religions. Personally I find the concept of truly random events to be very unsettling. A possible out could be that the causality graph is not acyclic, that is, that future events can inform the past, and that for example the "last" thing to happen in the universe "caused" the first.
Whenever I read this argument I ask myself with a certain amount of dread: "what if I'm nothing more than a machine that uses tons of statistical learning to decide my own next move?".
Put differently, it's unclear to me whether we have compelling evidence that we humans, in fact, are "better" / "more intelligent" than those LLMs.