On 6/5/2012 10:35 AM, John Clark wrote:
On Tue, Jun 5, 2012 on Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be
<mailto:marc...@ulb.ac.be>> wrote:
>> There are only two things I mean by "free will" because they are the
only two
that are not gibberish, but nobody around here except me likes either
definition:
1) Free Will is the inability to always know what you are going to do
before you do it.
> That would be too large. Pebbles does not know what they will do, for
example.
Yes, so pebbles have free will. I didn't say my definition of free will was useful, I
only said it was not gibberish.
> Free will is more in the knowledge of that inability,
But many people lack that knowledge including everyone on this list except me,
It's a matter of degree though. People may very reliably predict that they will not
choose to drive to Phoenix tonight and that they will have coffee with breakfast
tomorrow. So while you do not *always* know what you're going to do, you know your
preferences most of the time.
it is a fact that they can be absolutely positively 100% certain they will do X at
future time Y but when the time comes they find themselves doing something not even
close to X. In fact such a thing is not even rare.
But this doesn't affect their belief in 'free will' because they just think, "I changed my
mind." They may even regard it as evidence of contra-causal free will since there was no
cause known to them that changed their mind and yet the choice was still purposeful. The
feeling of 'free will' comes from the inability retrospectively to see all the causes; so
that, out of ignorance, it seems that one could have done otherwise.
Brent
> including its exploitation to accelerate the decision in absence of
complete
information.
Computers can make guesses based on the most probable outcome too, and if fitted with a
simple hardware random number generator can make guesses based on nothing at all; as
I've said computers used that fact to tell people how to build a H-bomb with the Monty
Carlo algorithm.
> 2) Free Will is a noise made by the mouth by a certain subset of bipedal
creatures.
I don't think so. Here you confuse the concept of free will with the noise
made by
mouth when talking on that concept in english.
But that's exactly the problem, there is no concept of free will, there is only the
noise "free will", a noise like a duck's "quack" that stands for nothing.
> there are many situation when a computer can predict its doing
Yes, but in general they can not.
John K Clark
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything
List" group.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Everything List" group.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
