Apologies for not being able to respond sooner. I don't know what is wrong with YN, but when attempting to respond a number of times now over the past few days I've repeatedly received the YN error message saying you've posted too much in too short a time, despite only having posted what's shown up on my public dashboard (which is hardly anything).

As for formal verification of software, there are often common problems with decidability that go ignored, or design problems within the model being tested where similar looking but ultimately different objects are treated the same in error (apples to oranges). This latter part is often quite common with abstraction and its acting as a conceptual black box.

Unfortunately, this is not just a simple brute force problem. Required properties for the system need to be preserved, and these properties may or may not be explicitly defined in the formal model under test, not to mention that many tools designed for this purpose also have a corresponding combinatorial explosion with regards to complexity in many cases. Termination as a property is one that is quite common, and famous in Computer Science (i.e. the Turing Halting problem).

We can design a model that will guarantee termination, but we cannot easily determine if an arbitrary model will terminate without first running it. The hard part is in the definition and coming up with the proof of correctness, not necessarily the actual verification of correctness part.

The former as far as I'm aware is always done by humans because machines above a trivial complexity will get stuck in loops largely due to the halting problem, or the predictability paradox (which also has roots in halting). They will chug away without realizing they've repeated the same steps ad infinitum. Inductive proofs as a class are one that a lot of machines choke on or run forever.

It seems to me like you may be confounding my meaning of 'non-determinism' in a context from Floyd, instead of from a system's property context (such as found in EE coursework on Signals and Systems).

The former context is a bit more relaxed than the latter (i.e. its similar to the same way as describing the absence of time in-variance [system property]), while the latter requires unique inputs to unique output maps (i.e. preserving that 1:1 function test at each step of a computation) The property basically acts as a virtual rail for the CPU states to follow some computational graph with at most only one edge being followed based on inputs.

Von Neumann Architectures are all inherently deterministic at the signal domain level, the instructions are static and usually in the same place, and its processed in the CPU (also a single fixed place, at a single time). The preserved property guarantees that each unique instruction will will always have a single unique output (given care with the design of the instructions), and will provide that same output regardless of time, absent further compromises as you go up the abstraction layers of the architecture.

Non-determinism can be introduced through coding of interfaces and other methods of abstraction that may break the property (such as flattening, shifting, etc).

Overall non-determinism's usefulness is vanishingly small (mostly being bugs, errors, and undefined behavior), and its introduction breaks any guarantees that further automation (which may be passed output from non-deterministic code) may work at all.

Non-determinism is largely uncharacterizable (outputs don't corresponding to input as potential causes) and as a result lacks the properties for troubleshooting (aside from a guess and check model), and in practice exception handling cannot generally correct these type of errors given the unpredictability.

Troubleshooting of digital systems is largely just an application of the structured properties. Absent those properties, you cannot isolate the problem without full knowledge of the system including its design spec for inputs and outputs (which often isn't available, or economic).

Unfortunately, the role of determinism or its absence as a system's properties doesn't allow any direct comparison without knowledge of the architecture. While we can make some assumptions, we wouldn't have any sound basis because the devil really is in the details with regards to how superposition can be leveraged, and the instruction set.

Sorry if this seemed a bit run-on. I find it is important to be clear without ambiguity with the meaning of the words which is why I'm clarifying (also given that I may not be able to respond timely if YN keeps blocking me). Hopefully this was sufficiently clear in identifying any discrepancies of underlying meaning.

> I'm not sure things are quite as dire as you assert.

The direness of the assertion comes from long experience and intimate understanding of feedback systems, and a realization of the dependencies for acting on problems.

Generally speaking, Feedback systems are normally considered broken when they no longer appropriately react to signals they should normally react to.

Perception in people is just one such feedback system, and there are structures of stimuli that can bypass it in most people. Cialdini has documented a number of these in his book Influence. Other areas such as Reflected Appraisal and its distortion, along with destructive interference have also been investigated related to our biological stages of development for self concept the main way we transfer culture to our offspring (Ericksonian Identity), as well as some subtle applications of Sapir-Whorf in the 1950s on PoWs (which follow Cialdini's Consistency Principle).

The general rule of thumb for feedback systems are when they continue running, once broken the longer they take to catastrophic breakdown the higher the overall cost.

In an ecological overshoot environment, where failure of society to organize (such as happens in a breakdown) or even react leads to a failure to feed ourselves, it requires a critical view based solely on the existential risk.

Now if your perception is changed without you recognizing or alerting to it, such that you no longer recognize certain problems and discount them from your awareness, you become blind, and without knowing/being able to react you cannot act to correct it. Critically thinking people may be able to cope better than others, but no one I know is hyper-rational all the time.

Perception underlies most of what we do, so when these structures and the following consequences happen, you ultimately get stuck in a feedback loop as an unthinking automata without realizing it. You may perform regular fixed action patterns but its still the same output oblivious to the danger signals you may be receiving.

Associative priming of unrelated things is one such method discovered in the past 70 years, similar to attenuating signals (jamming), or front of line blocking (more common in bureacracy); those are the two most common ways these systems fail.

Would you not consider a subtle, indirect, and blinding madness that is uncharacterizable but spreading and overtaking people, and chaotically increasing across a population a greater imposition than an AI agent crudely disrupting people's ability to communicate (which the underlying mechanic this agent performs has been shown to break people; with a cohort trending towards this type of psychotic behavior or alternatively dissassociating completely as automata)?

Its been well documented that the first thing to go in torture is often rational thought, which would be our sole defense.

Authors Meerloo and Lifton both cover case studies of these type of mental torture structures which have been used both by Nazi's and Mao, as well as so haphazardly and carelessly today by businesses towards manipulating sentiment and marketing, none more commonly than social media and adtech.

Meerloo covers WW2 Nazi Thought Reform through Mao (where they broke perception). Lifton documents in detail the case studies from victim POWs in the Korean Conflict (Mao). These structures are even commonly found in schools.

Personally, I think a blinding illness that spreads subtly through communication, that you can't react to without first being inoculated against is a pretty dire threat.

Predictability Paradox and links to Halting (overview)
https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10670-020-003...