Brent Meeker writes:
Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
>
>
> Tom Caylor writes (in response to Marvin Minsky):
>
>> Regarding Stathis' question to you about truth, your calling the idea
>> of believing unsound seems to imply that you are assuming that there is
>> no truth that we can discover. But on the other hand, if there is no
>> discoverable truth, then how can we know that something, like the
>> existence of freedom of will, is false?
>
> That's easy: it's logically impossible. When I make a decision, although
> I take all the evidence into account, and I know I am more likely to
> decide one way rather than another due to my past experiences and due to
> the way my brain works, ultimately I feel that I have the freedom to
> overcome these factors and decide "freely". But neither do I feel that
> this free decision will be something random: I'm not mentally tossing a
> coin, but choosing according to my beliefs and values. Do you see the
> contradiction here?
Yes, but it's a contrived contradiction. You have taken "free" to mean independent of
you where "you" refers to your past experience, the way your brain works, etc. As
Dennett says, that's not a free will worth having.
Indeed, but it's how people often think of free will. It's even how I think of
it, without reflecting on its impossibility.
Stathis Papaioannou
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