[FRIAM] A deranged circle of hell

[Marcus Daniels]

Or is it the SSRIs? 

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> on behalf of Pieter Steenekamp <pieters at randcontrols.co.za>
Date: Friday, June 6, 2025 at 10:07 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A deranged circle of hell 

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 <mailto: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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