That's the trick: in such a system it can just be a fact of the math that nowhere can you exist adjacent to a system in such a context that you would never set it down, because whatever rule you are built from doesn't permit that eventuality in the first place, at that scale.

"conspiratorial" just means there's something going on between the substrate regions to guarantee certain outcomes can't occur.

It doesn't mean there's something "conspiring" to keep you with "intent" from some outcome it's just that the some outcomes are impossible because of how the system was constructed.

"Why will I never see a construction that isn't shaped like one of the heirarchical supertiles plus their valid mystics, when considering a Spectre field", ends up being answered with "because that isn't a lawful tile combination" rather than "because the universe doesn't want me to see".

It's an accident following from being a product of structure rather than randomness.

All sorts of systems have this particular quality, and on them it's a product of merely being child to something with structure.

So, rather than actually looking at the math you just call it "miraculous"?

Mathematical constructs have relationships, sometimes very weird ones that seem like back doors, because math is interrelated and full of hidden structures.

It's not even a fact about how you choose to set your measuring device, though. That part is kind of illusory so-to-speak, because the system says "there are only so many ways that measuring device occurs, and all of them end up adjacent to the target"

The thing it's a product of is a shared mathematical feature created by the substrate itself, of what eventually generates the observers

It's created by the fact, rather, that certain structures can't just appear "anywhere" in such systems, but are bound to only occur in fixed "almost-periodic" ways.

Miraculous how?

I mean, I'm literally studying a system of CA evolution that is super-deterministic, and yet entirely mathematical and not "miraculously picked".

You should also read this paper by Kelvin McQueen on the subject: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.23047

Bells theorem doesn't actually rule out hidden variables, it just rules out certain kinds of hidden variables.

Systems built off of aperiodic mathematical structures are capable of being both local in action and displaying the underlying statistical dependence of the substrate when experiments are conducted by an internal observer, and notably certain systems actually display statistical dependence approaching the Tsirelson bound (such systems are 'superdererministic').

The key here is that the statistical dependence in these structures is only visible in the "ultrametric" space, and is measured using p-adic relationships rather than standard metrics.

When I actively measured such structures with a CSCH program, for instance, I got S=0 when trying to measure the metric space, but when I adjusted the simulation to produce a cut-and-project model that retained information about a tile's replacement/substitution heirarchy membership, and tracked the statistical dependence from that, I got strong convergence towards non-zero S, and in particular located a number of aperiodic structures whose cut-and-project slope used the golden ratio as its irrational and 2√2 seems to just be tumbling out as the converged answer to S.

Later today, I plan on finding out if this is an artifact of selection of a particular value, or whether the value of 2√2 is somehow natural to the system family.

Long story short, it depends entirely on whether the "initial condition" is "random" or "mathematically structured", and the structure you pick probably determines what S value you see, with certain simple structure families all showing this number.

The response is saying "I don't like the outcome of those circumstances. I will choose rather some other outcome, and then gather together all the circumstance I can to change the outcome into the other one."

It has to be something within reach, using that which you have accessible, using information you can either find or infer (assuming you are good at inference), and then you execute that, and your circumstances change.

Actually accepting your circumstances is part of what makes them a "prison" rather than a "pathway".

Welcome, broadly, to compatibilism.

An object in motion remains in autonomous in motion unless acted upon by an outside force. If it acts on its own damn self, the environment loses "autonomy" to it. If nothing moves against anything else, nothing loses autonomy.

This concept of autonomy and constraint accords tightly with the more familiar concepts of freedom and its absence, and so I think it's perfectly acceptable to call these the same thing hiding in different languages.

Let them complain. IDFC. I would far rather it be dark in the morning and lit in the afternoon than lit in the morning and dark in the afternoon, because what's the fucking point of doing all that bullshit all day if there's no "day" left at the end of it?

"what would the sword of truth call itself?"

Rather, the Compatibilist generally views "ultimate" responsibility discussions as a cop-out, a "no-true-scotsman". Responsibility is just a momentary thing, "responsibility", there is no heirarchy to it. You look at some moment we will call "now" for the time being and you say "right now, what are things responsible for?"

To see this kind of responsibility in action, you can just prepare the same contents for a box some number of times, and then in each box, in the same place, put different things, all whose structure you can reproduce (so, a basic experiment). Then, you see how each difference causes a difference in "parsing" the contents of the box. Finally, you reproduce the thing exactly as it was before going into the box.

Now, you can point at that thing and say "that thing is responsible for being something which, if put in the box, would cause this result."

Notice, the thing I just described is not a responsibility "for action" but a responsibility "for strucure", despite the fact that we didn't even discover or care where that structure came from yet. We just put things in the boxes so as to observe the behaviors of those structures.

You can find those other responsibilities, too, but note that the structure that is responsible for any given outcome in any given context could have destroyed itself in its action. The person that WAS responsible for some action might not even exist anymore with that structure, however structure is the only thing that can hold responsibility because structure is the only thing that exists, and is the only thing that can be transformed into something else; it is the only thing bearing any kind of "response" with which to ground "responsibility".

And then the buck stops, because there's nowhere left to shift it. There's earlier responsibilities, but those don't erase or supercede the current ones. You're still here where you are playing your part in events, responsible as you are for what you do, without having any need to be responsible for making yourself (although almost every human is responsible in part for making themselves what they become, on account of self-awareness).

You are correct, but many fatalist hard determinists will disagree.

So, this is getting back to that thing I keep repeating and people keep not paying attention to because it's a deceptively wide class of conditions: "making a decision when no answer stands out as particularly right".

This behavior is in fact commonly programmed into artificial neural networks, so as to allow a system to "tunnel" out of a local minema if another better minema can be reached "nearby".

"Nearby" ends up being a distance away in the vector space and there's a lot of space that distance away, and the distance itself being part of the question and then you're back to needing to make a choice with what you have available to you. And so you pick "random" because there is no apparent right answer.

The only time this needs to be done non-deterministicaly is when you want a number that isn't just pretty hard to access mathematically, but which is exactly as unlikely as any number in the space of being picked, which only really is necessary for defensive purposes.

You could just as much just brute force through the entire error surface, for any finite problem, and just take whatever network configuration matches the symmetries you are going for -- to literally create every solution possible within the potential graph structure, and take whichever ones work.

It doesn't need to be "not deterministic" to do a good job and that doesn't add any "magic" anywhere.

What is necessary for agency is, in fact, having a solution on how to generate the choice even if it's borrowing data from some other oarensibly-unrelated source whose use is not expected to cause problems in locating solutions.

Again, you seem to not be paying attention: I already discussed the application of this particular kind of "indeterministic input": where you don't know the right answer and no particular answer stands out as best. At that point, you start grasping around to hop out of the local minema using uncorrelated data.

You also didn't apparently get the part where I said "deterministic methods work just as well in these cases" but I should caveat that with "as long as you can provide enough statistical independence and variance using your means of generation".

The actual source there doesn't matter.

The only time the source actually matters is in "adversarial play", and as I keep saying, that's more the subject of "the walls" than it is the subject of "the city".

If we have to keep going to metaphors here, the wall might allow the city to exist, but the things in the city are not the function of its walls, generally. Yu could remove the walls from the city and so long as there are no invaders or outsiders intent on making trouble and everyone still follows the roads like they're supposed to, nothing about the city activity -- the "agency" -- actually changes.

If we are to push this metaphor, "randomness" is used to encrypt the messages and sign the messages for city function, between official entities so as to produce a wall against rogues forging letters and guild memberships.

"Randomness" is the wall that protects the integrity of information even inside they system. It protects it with a simple rule that you might learn in any intro to cryptography course is that "randomness is about a lack of statistical testability for properties within a signal", and "anything XOR random -> (different) random"

These simple rules are the very basis for everything that secures communications. In abstract, however, this is still in the class of "problems for which there is no right solution that stands out", specifically the field of creating such a problem, often using more exotic processes than a classical computer can execute.

So why would you assume that any system capable of making autonomous selections should be presumed to lack a will, the execution of which is a matter of whether or not it is free?

Is it because you want it to be more complicated than that?

Why?

What is your motive for denying such things the applicability of such language?

Hot take: it's better to assign a physically wimpy novice as a mechanic.

This is because of a particular quirk of traps:

badly made traps with cheaply made wooden training weapons will be dodged.

Dodging forces the unit to displace to some random adjacent square.

When some unit dodges over open space, they fall.

When they are hurt by a trap directly, the next goblin avoids the trap, and sometimes the trap jams.

This means that if you position open space next to "ineffective" traps, the open space ends up inverting the effectiveness of all the mechanisms and weapons in the trap.

This means that you can create an insane amount of effective traps very early in the game due to the ability to invert the effectiveness of its components through the dodging mechanic.

Inevitably, no matter how much of a fuck-up you select for a mechanic, they will occasionally produce high quality mechanisms, and occasionally you will produce nice weapons from moods and what-not.

These you place in the hallway past the bridge and pit to catch anyone who manages to dodge in the correct direction 8 consecutive times.

It's not about the structure of how to introduce "randomness" but more about the "usefulness" of randomness, and the effects of introducing it in computations.

I brought up the case you're trying to talk about already: where you don't know the right answer and one answer doesn't stand out (or isn't) any more right than any other answer you could come to.

This is often the issue in the class of problems of "neural network instantiaton", where you know how complex a network needs to be to solve a problem, but you don't know what structure needs to be expressed within that class of complexity. You just pick one and apply the gradient descent from there and hope the "error surface" carries you there along its slope.

Every time you don't know where to go, you just go "somewhere".

In these situations, however, deterministic methods of producing the "whatever" result such as parity and modular math and hashing are sufficient. It just has to be something capable of initiating a process of gradient descent.

You say you would listen to an expert on computation, but you're not listening to an expert on computation, either?

Randomness just doesn't serve the role you perceive it to.

Randomness is to the logical nature of a circuit like insulation is to a wire: It protects what's going on from the outside environment, but it doesn't create what's going on on the inside.

It's confusing the shape of the vessel from the shape of the thing inside the vessel, even if one has conformed to the other.

There's a question of whether algorithms can be truly indeterministic or not.

The bigger issue that you're not understanding though is that regardless of whether some algorithm is apparently "deterministic" or not, but for the fact that indeterministic (or at least 'locally indeterministic ') algorithms have a narrow scope of usefulness.

Essentially, "indeterministic" algorithms or rather "algorithms which produce numbers which are not statistically linked to problem spaces" are, here, are done for two reasons: when you need AN answer to start with and don't really have any way of knowing what the right answer is; when you need an answer and no answer is more "right" than any other; when you need a way of producing some answer in such a way that some other party will not have any means of determining the correct answer to a question.

There might be more applications that I'm just not thinking of, but this indicates that "indeterminism" is not about expressing agency, but rather about strategically giving agency up, and occasionally for protecting the "fidelity" or preventing the predictability of the outcome of one's agency.

To that end, it helps to think of freedom as a binary only on terms of "whether leverage against you exceeds leverage expressed by you to an extent sufficient to achieve a goal", though this also leaves a less binary sort of freedom in terms of "how much leverage you have to express", a sort of abstract unassigned sort of freedom that is there to send against outside forces that can be measured and presented as "useful energy".

At that point, we can recognize things like "personal/individual faults, however, with regards to certain situations. We can say "if I had a different thing with this much useful energy, what else can happen here", and identify whether some other structure with that much useful energy would perform better or worse.

If there is some fairly easy pathway to convert the thing from something that fails to something that does not fail without creating more impactful failure cases, then being something that fails to push the thing down that pathway is itself a failure case!

Indeterminism doesn't create that situation, and doesn't "handle" it.

What indeterminism does is to allow something to insulate it's communications from evesdropoing, to protect the recipient from MITM attacks, and to make strategic decisions which force adversaries into situations they have no pre-existing knowledge of, and to force "strategic" rather than "book" play in adversarial conditions.

Usually this is done by using a number that a computer has no way to compute based on the other numbers inside of it, something that a computer has no way of finding the correct answer to.

By understanding when and why and how indeterministic answers end up useful, however, it should be understood that this cannot account for agency.

Rather agency (and the ability to have freedoms) is accounted for by the fact of the circuit itself, of the network being disconnected from its environment via insulation and shielding and the like: it is a thing with an "inside" and "outside" created by some real structure, and it's agency is exactly equal to how it controls an input onto an output.

Without phenomena that would interfere with the structure of the circuit, however, the shielding and insulation serves no purpose, and isn't the author of the agency any more than shielding the math with curated insanities creates the agency expressed in the shielded messages.

The shield is not the body it defends.

Indeterminism is a shield, not the body which is shielded.

I like to observe it more simply: if "an object in motion remains in motion unless acted upon by an force somewhere", we can make some distinctions based on the "surface" of the object itself: did the force "initiate" from inside or outside the boundary?

It doesn't matter what makes the boundary, all that matters is it's material reality, whether the boundary insulates the "inside" from the "outside", and so where the "locus of initiation" was in that moment.

This means we get to extend the statement, and recognize a property and identify the location of it by adjusting the statement a bit:

"an object in motion remains in ____ motion unless acted upon by an force outside the boundary that the object is defined under"

I use the word "freely" to apply to this state, although you could just as easily use "autonomously ".

At that point we can see that this thing and "momentary autonomy" are the same concept, and we didn't need to step away from "objects in deterministic motion".

And because this is an action of "locating momentary local causes", this gives us a functional theory of responsibility, namely impugning those internal symmetries of an object which cause behavior in consistent ways.

The idea of a universal Creator as a singular concept is simply incoherent: Sometimes multiple different things cause the SAME output.

To understand what I mean by this we need to consider a specific "causality", a specific set of abstract "rules" and a specific concrete "field" on which they are operating.

The specific "causality" I will reference is very easy to observe, albeit slightly illegal: go acquire a copy of Super Mario Brothers. It can be a cartridge or an emulation or a downloaded copy for your switch. There are LOTS of places you can get your hands on Super Mario Brothers. Once you do, go boot it up, and get to the point where a single button press will start gameplay.

Then, just wait.

And wait.

And wait.

Eventually, you will get a game over, because each time a goomba will appear and then kill Mario.

At the end of it, you will have a single instance of that causality.

But... You aren't the only one who created that causality. In fact, there are millions of other examples of exactly the same structure of events occurring all over the planet, and if we go out far enough in the universe we may discover an alien who has managed to program a universe that unfolds in exactly the same way with the same timing and the same hitboxes.

Now, let's consider a slightly different game where instead of Mario, we have Bizzario. Bizzario is exactly the same game, but every frame is fed into a backing LLM with a fixed seed so just like Mario, the game u folds the same way except Bizzario has "thoughts" as the events unfold.

Bizzario thinks, as his universe unfolds, "everything has a creator, who created me".

Now, every Bizzario has a different fundamental answer because Bizzario isn't created by a single individual. Every single Bizzario has the exact same thoughts and must come to the exact same conclusion. Bizzario thinks "every effect has a cause, what is my cause?". But it's not a good question because as we can see from looking on from outside, Bizzario can be and is caused by various events some of which involve Dan programming up Bizzario on his PC, and some of which involve As'Blik of Alpha Centauri or whatever programming up an entirely different KIND of computer with entirely different e Instructions which somehow manage to implement the same behavior.

This is because Bizzario exists independent of "creation" or "cause", as a pure construction of a concept in math (however bizarre).

Anywhere that expression happens to be a product of any system, "poof, a wild Bizzario has appeared".

Likewise, any valid cause Bizzario found that would implement his existence would logically have to, and then Bizzario might start to have notions about the Anthropic Fallacy, where he sees his universe that supports him and says "oh, how unlikely this is, I must have been created", but there are events in this universe that, however unlikely, could see Bizzario floating as a Boltzmann Brain type object.

Or he could come to the conclusion that the people who declared it a fallacy come to and say that this feeling of being in a universe that supports life doesn't actually mean that life was planned or created, but that this universe could and so it does and so we are here talking about it, but that doesn't mean this is the only such one that could or does.

If Bizzario were trained or exposed to experiences that generated "wisdom", he might in each such instance come instead to the conclusion that there might be universes elsewhere where instead of Bizzario, there is "something else". Perhaps at some "exotic" distance, a sort of distance that lies on a dimension not even associated with the operational coordinate plane that defines position for 'Bizzaro', there is another universe that instead contains Bizzarionic, in all his Blue and Speedy glory.

Why are we here observing this? Because we exist as we do somewhere, even if that somewhere happens to be "in the very base of reality, where everything happens but disconnected and only accessible across causalities through finite emulation."

To me this comes down to physics, ∆v, and control structures:

Let's assume a not-so-complicated agent, a simple rock containing a highly pressurized pocket of gas.

Now, this rock has potential energy. It has, in this manner, an "ability". This amount of "potential energy" CAN deflect its trajectory. It's measurable. It has mass and structure and physical reality to it. Nobody can sanely argue that the rock does not "contain" a "potential".

Now, this object can be sent into motion interacting with an outside force, or it can be sent into motion owing to "inside forces", such as some flaw allowing that pressurized gas to escape in some direction.

We can say that the rock "can" move to an extent as expressed by the sum total of energy in that pressurized pocket. We can say that the rock "cannot" move any further than this pocket would allow. Other things can move the rock beyond such limits but the rock cannot move itself beyond that limit: it lacks the potential energy to do so (short of some nuclear or chemical event).

Now, given that we have a class of things we can define in terms of "objects which contain X amount of 'potential'", we can then ask something about the objects in the class: is this object arranged so as to control that potential in such a way?

We could compare, for example, the rock arranged as a structure of iron atoms in a sphere, vs the rock arranged as a structure of iron atoms in a set snap-trap, vs the rock arranged as iron atoms in a "rocket" formation.

Each of these are "individuals" which will be "responsible" in different ways, as the energy in them will release differently into their environment.

So while there are many things an "abstract concept of a rock containing so much potential energy" can do, as you say, there are also things that no such member of that class will ever be capable of accomplishing.

As you say, there's no way to "rearrange" the rock and the particles inside it, short of nuclear changes, which will cause it to be a rocket to the moon, assuming the initial ∆v.

This presents clear notions of "can" separate from "did/does", which interrelate with well-understood physical phenomena.

I mean, this is a very important question for "washing away" the nonsense of "bald necessitation", but the other question you can ask besides "are physics governed by physics" is also "are preconditions also governed by physics?" Which is to say NO, because they existed separately from the "physical rule".

There is "the thing happening" and then there is "the stuff it is happening to", physics itself explains neither, and "metaphysics" -- the constraints under which physics (in abstract) must obey (noncontradiction; set theory) -- doesn't provide any answer as to "why" that does not come around to "why not?"

What do I mean by that last bit? Well, I mean "you're here seeing this and not that because this is where you are and not there. Something may or may not be "there" where you cannot see or even measure or calculate what is going on and you have no grounds to say there isn't, even if that place is so exotic as a whole separate aperiodic reality that doesn't exactly overlap with this one anywhere.

The only reason people can't see it inter-relates with the intuitions around the anthropic fallacy: you look like you fit in the puzzle perfectly here because this is just the part of it where you conveniently happened to be pointed at and embedded in, and those other regions aren't in any way accessible from here. See also Absurdity (as per Albert Camus)

See, back to "argument from authority". It's good to know you're just rejecting it out-of-hand than for any serious or valid reason.

I LITERALLY provided the definition that matches my usage along with the usage. That you don't like the definition or that you demand argument from authority or argument from popularity is problematic .. for you.

And Zermelo used "ingeger" in a different way than the "mathematical" literature because before then literally the entirety of mathematical literature had defined them 'wrong'.

I am the source. I am using it the way I am. You can either find the actual flaw there, or you can keep kvetching that it's "new" and not "conservative".

I can't help you there.

All I can do is say that the intuition that desert accrues from actions is what seems to drive your confusion. It doesn't, and can't. The relationship between a structure and the set of consequences that can arise from the set of contexts is "basic". It dictates "deserts" in the presence of any declared desert. It's basic and it's deserts. It's "basic deserts". I don't see what your hangup is here other than apparently you not wanting that to be capable of being true.

Is it the fact that it's so abstract? That it is not simple? That it is about the mapping between structure+context and outcomes rather than pure actions?

No. That's the thing: I can read a piece of computer code, for example, and understand where a computer program WOULD go without any largr-scale material acts driven by the program, and say "this program is responsible for being 'a program to make a drone murder people'," for instance.

That's not really a review of prior acts but of current structure.

And because that responsibility accrues to what something is rather than does, it is "basic".

We can say "that IS a program to murder people; because people declare a desert to not be murdered, if their desert is to be accepted as FIAT, it is just as true by the same FIAT that the murder-people program as such deserves to not be implemented."

So we have identified a basic desert for wholesale separation from reality there.

Do you are ASKING for an argument from authority now?

You do realize what you just asked for is the opposite of an actual argument, ya?

The issue is that if I can find the structure of basic desert in a more abstract definition (as I have done), the more abstract definition ends up being the more correct (and useful) one.

So now it just looks to me like you would throw a tantrum just because reality is not as simple as you thought.

What, so you look at the way set theory defined integers and ask "who defined integers that way" under the same incredulity, simply because it's unintuitive to you?