On Wed, Jun 6, 2012 at 8:53 AM, John Clark <johnkcl...@gmail.com <mailto:johnkcl...@gmail.com>> wrote:On Tue, Jun 5, 2012 meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net <mailto:meeke...@verizon.net>> wrote: > while you do not *always* know what you're going to do, you know your preferences most of the time. And Turing proved that some of the time a computer can tell if it will eventually stop or not, but not all of the time. > 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. Yes, and unlike other definitions of "free will" this one is not gibberish, however when you boil it down all it's really saying is you don't know what you don't know. The highest status the philosophical "concept" called "free will" can aspire to is that of being right but trivially circular, most of the time it's not even that, most of the time it's just gibberish.
Aside from the philosophical concept, there is the social/legal concept of not coerced, referred to as exercising 'free will', which is what Stenger proposes just to call "autonomy".
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