I'm Just Guessing, Okay?

It's weird that The Onion A.V. Club had such a positive reaction to Paycheck. Don't get me wrong, it's an okay movie, but you know... so.

Free will is an illusion. Stop crying about it already -- ethically speaking, whether what you perceive as free will exists in the silly Cartesian sense (like, is it in here?) or is merely a side-affect of the complicated interconnection network of neurons in your brain does not really matter in terms of your day-to-day interactions with other human beings. However, it has big implications when it comes to your attempts to build a machine that can see into the future. See, if there actually is such a thing as free will, then you can avoid taking the actions taken by your avatar in a vision of your future self and thus the vision of the future provided by the machine is wrong and so such a machine cannot exist. If there isn't such a thing as free will, then you would almost be able to build this machine. But wait -- how could you see your own future and not be able to act to change it? Try not to let this fuck your mind: A future-viewing machine would need to be able to show you the outcome of a series of wave function collapses -- theoretically, each quantum superpositioning (you may comfortably abstract this into an "event," I think) produces a set of outcomes in the form of parallel universes in Hilbert space. Maybe your machine can enumerate all of them, and one is bound to match the resulting outcome of the collapse of your universe's cumulative wave-function combined with the outcome of your seeing a vision of the future. The result would be a vision of the future from which you would actually be unable to deviate. But to compute this, the machine would already have to have an accurate vision of the future with which to provide you -- something it wouldn't have until finishing the computation. It's an infinitely recursive function, like some kind of mega-quine. Point is, you can't build it. Sorry, Philip K. Dick -- Richard Feynman just fucked you with The Rabbit.

Don't think I'm saying that the mind's perception of free will has anything to do with quantum mechanics. I'm not. Anyone that thinks the two are related in a significant way is an idiot.