[FRIAM] A deranged circle of hell

[Pieter Steenekamp]

Thank you, Steve.

I’ve been thinking... Do I really choose to have a positive outlook on life?

We’ve discussed free will before, and I’ve shared my thoughts. But recently
I came across a few new ideas on the topic, and it got me wondering again.

What is free will, anyway? Honestly, I have no clue.

What I do know is this: over time, I’ve learned a few things that help me
feel better. Not from any grand philosophy, just from reading, listening,
watching others—and, well, trial and error.

One weird example: cold showers. They make me feel good. Not while I’m in
them, obviously—that part’s awful. But afterward, I feel great. And then I
do other useful things, like tackling boring tasks I’ve been avoiding.

So here's the question: when I take a cold shower, is that my free will at
work? Or is it just my inner AI reacting to good reinforcement?

And if I do have free will when I choose to suffer under icy water... then
does an AI trained to do hard things for rewards also have free will?

I’ll let you know once I figure it out. Probably from inside the next cold
shower.

On Fri, 6 Jun 2025 at 18:06, steve smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> wrote:

> Pieter -
> > Wow, that's quite a dark view of the future with the capitalists
> > running the show!
> >
> > I just want to repeat what I said before — nobody knows the future.
> > And we also don’t know what will happen if we try different policies now.
> >
> > Maybe I am living in a bubble, and maybe I’m totally wrong — but I’m
> > honestly glad that my view of the future is still bright.
> I will grant you that there is significant upside to being optimistic
> and able to appreciate and hope for the future... it is difficult to
> manifest something you can't imagine.
>
> At times I'm the one chided for being optimistic.   I think the phrase
> was "hope in one hand and sh*t in the other and see which one fills up
> first".   The image was mildly sobering but it didn't make me any less
> fundamentally optimistic in spite of my ability (propensity) to conjure
> "worst case scenarios" with my frontal lobes tied behiind my back.   It
> is probably an addiction, the dopamine channels fueled by cynicism.
>
> I take this crue here to be intrinsically technoUtopian, to have a bias
> and live in confirmation bias around "every problem has a technical
> solution".    It is what took me into science and then diverted me into
> more technological roles... the idea that I could outthink every
> problem, preferably with a large crew of like minded folks nominally
> working on the same problem and possibly with the economic might of the
> US Science and Engineering budget to provide resources.   At home I'm a
> hopeful tinkerer who pats the device or the garden on the head every
> time I have applied a little "common sense" to it and try to "hope" it
> into returning to the homeostatic mode it was "designed" to operate
> in.   This works often enough that I still do it most of the time.  I
> rarely give up on things and throw them away.  I tend to take over other
> people's "lost causes" and try to outsmart the gremlins inside of them.
>
> So my tendency to *piss in the punchbowl* around grand technological
> solutions is probably at least half dopamine self-medication to make up
> for the *bizarre* self-destructive behaviour of our government and
> industry... especially that of the USA, notably throughout *my* lifetime
> but acutely more numbskulled in the last 10...
>
> In closing, I want to acknowledge the value of your positivity and my
> own (ab)use of that as a foil to feed my addiction to technoCynicism.
>
> - Steve
>
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