I don't know... I've been thinking about this kind of thing occasionally for a long time, however informally, and it's hard for me to see the intention of "I pick whatever the number is that will come up" as different from the intention of "I control the variable which is 'whether or not the number I picked is the number that came up' to have the value 'true'", and that in turn doesn't seem that essentially different from the intention of "I control what number comes up".
I'm not sure how to explain the intuition quickly, but it might help to consider all the possible timelines in light of things like the butterfly effect, and think through which ones would be made more likely or less likely if your intention to pick the numbers that would come up succeeded, and then think through which ones would be made more likely or less likely if you instead intended to pick some numbers and then have them come up. The "random" chance that propagates through your thought process, into your decision about what to try to make the future look like, is not clearly different in kind from the "random" chance that propagates through the space and time leading up to the random number generation.
(Also it might help to study the abstraction called "structural equation models", to help formalize how these two forms of random chance could be separated: structural equation models show various ways of carving up a partly-random situation into a deterministic part and random inputs feeding into the deterministic part.)
I have a hard time seeing how those two forms of "random" chance could be caused to line up, one way or another, without there being some kind of intelligent mediator or infrastructure or something to make that happen. And if it has intelligence, it might also have consciousness or otherwise end up with independent opinions about whether it likes what you're attempting. Or maybe just opinions about whether what you're attempting is somehow self-contradictory on a broader scale, so that it might as well just start deterring you now (e.g. in order to be maximally helpful given what you will foreseeably have ended up wanting later). You might think it's just "scrying" or "dowsing" or whatever, "just" perceiving some underlying fact, but it would clearly be weird for it to be a simple minimally-processed mechanical linkage from the future fact to an intuitive perception, so probably there's something going on under the hood that you don't know about.
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branchandroot
Re: Lottery Magic For Not Winning The Lottery
Date: 2023-07-25 12:03 am (UTC)I don't know... I've been thinking about this kind of thing occasionally for a long time, however informally, and it's hard for me to see the intention of "I pick whatever the number is that will come up" as different from the intention of "I control the variable which is 'whether or not the number I picked is the number that came up' to have the value 'true'", and that in turn doesn't seem that essentially different from the intention of "I control what number comes up".
I'm not sure how to explain the intuition quickly, but it might help to consider all the possible timelines in light of things like the butterfly effect, and think through which ones would be made more likely or less likely if your intention to pick the numbers that would come up succeeded, and then think through which ones would be made more likely or less likely if you instead intended to pick some numbers and then have them come up. The "random" chance that propagates through your thought process, into your decision about what to try to make the future look like, is not clearly different in kind from the "random" chance that propagates through the space and time leading up to the random number generation.
(Also it might help to study the abstraction called "structural equation models", to help formalize how these two forms of random chance could be separated: structural equation models show various ways of carving up a partly-random situation into a deterministic part and random inputs feeding into the deterministic part.)
I have a hard time seeing how those two forms of "random" chance could be caused to line up, one way or another, without there being some kind of intelligent mediator or infrastructure or something to make that happen. And if it has intelligence, it might also have consciousness or otherwise end up with independent opinions about whether it likes what you're attempting. Or maybe just opinions about whether what you're attempting is somehow self-contradictory on a broader scale, so that it might as well just start deterring you now (e.g. in order to be maximally helpful given what you will foreseeably have ended up wanting later). You might think it's just "scrying" or "dowsing" or whatever, "just" perceiving some underlying fact, but it would clearly be weird for it to be a simple minimally-processed mechanical linkage from the future fact to an intuitive perception, so probably there's something going on under the hood that you don't know about.