On 12 May 2012, at 08:02, John Clark wrote:
On Fri, May 11, 2012 at 1:58 PM, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be>
wrote:
> And why did you murder your wife? the judge asked.
If I had a reason I killed my wife and the judge thought that reason
indicated I was unlikely to do something like that again (I killed
her because she was chasing me with a bloody ax) then the judge
should set me free; if the reason I killed her indicates I would be
a menace to society in the future (I killed her because I didn't
like the twinkle in her eye) then the judge should not set me free.
If I killed her for no reason whatsoever then I'm a extremely
dangerous ticking time bomb and a few hundred amps of electricity
passing through my body would improve me immeasurably in just a few
minutes.
> You did acknowledge that between computable and non computable
there are intermediates, but there are intermediate between
computable and random, and between self-determinism and self-
indeterminism.
Yes, and the technical term for the idea that events are neither
random nor deterministic is "gibberish", although some experts
prefer the word "bullshit".
The free-will notion is not related to the possible determinacy in the
big picture. Events can be neither random, nor *determined* by me in
the situation I am embedded in.
You seems to ignore (again?) the local points of view, and the fact
that, although machines can be said determined, they are not entirely
determined from what they can know about themselves at the time they
decide to act.
So your argument is not against "free-will can make sense", but
against the idea that "free-will can make sense from some absolute
point of view".
> Coercion involves the free will, or responsibility, of other agents.
Cannot comment, don't know what ASCII string "free will" means.
It means the ability to chose among a set of future possibilities on
which "I" am currently ignorant. It is the ability to decide, when
knowing you are ignorant of many parameters, or to decide in
acknowledging absence of complete information.
It is certainly a tricky notion, like consciousness and conscience/
moral responsibility, but I fail to se why you are sure that it does
not make (local) sense.
You are neglecting the particular context, or situation in which
agents are embedded. What you say make sense for absolute free will,
but not for relative free will of an agent in a complex situation
where, although he is determined, he can't be aware of the
determination. Situation like that abounds in the laws, jurisprudence,
and is capital in the human sciences, and one day in the computer
science too (even without comp).
Free-will is a higher order relational notion, and it is totally
unrelated to the determinacy question, although it can be related with
some notion of local, actual, self-indeterminacy (but NOT the comp-1-
indeterminacy, in this case it *is* more the Turing type of partial
indeterminacy). As I. J. Good remarked, it can be related also with
relative speed of computation, and this can be useful to understand
the role of consciousness in free will.
- Bruno Marchal
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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