On Mon, Jun 18, 2012 at 10:20 AM, John Clark <johnkcl...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 17, 2012 meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote: > > >>Can you give an example of something neither determined nor random? >>> >> >> > No, not that I know to be such >> > > What a surprise. > I can provide an example of something that is neither random nor determined* * (from certain perspectives) Cursor movements when controlling a VM. While a super-intelligent AI program running in the VM could come up with theories about the mouse movements, even possibly learning some rudimentary rules about acceleration and inertia from the movements of the cursor, or theorize they are controlled by diurnal creatures, such an AI could never truly predict when and where the mouse pointer will be moved next. Similarly, when one plays a computer game, from the perspective of the AI characters in the game, your character is controlled by an indeterminable process whose total information and description can never be fully known to those characters within the simulation. Chalmers mentions this as a possibility for concretely realizing dualism: http://consc.net/papers/matrix.html There is little difference, that I can see, between Brent's proposed spirit world intervening in the physical world, and brains in vats intervening in a virtual world, and there is nothing impossible about the latter scenario. From the perspective of those in the virtual world, the actions of entities would be neither random nor determined. Jason > > >but believers in contra causal free will think that at least some of >> their actions are. >> > > In other words believers in contra causal free will (whatever the hell > that's supposed to mean) believe that nothing caused them to do it and > being masters of doublethink simultaneously believe that nothing didn't > cause them to do it, in still other words believers in "contra causal free > will" believe in the power of gibberish. > > > I don't know whether they would allow that psychological states must be >> either deterministic or random. >> > > What do you mean you don't know! If they did it because they wanted to > then it's deterministic. > > > There is even an interpretation of QM (mostly associated with Henry >> Stapp) that looks at "random" events as "caused by future states". >> > > Fine, but if it's caused then it's not random. Maybe things we believe are > random are really caused but the causes are very strange, however just > because humans find them weird does not make them one bit less mechanical. > Perhaps last month you had no choice and you just had to spend good money > to see the movie "John Carter on Mars", you were forced into it because a > hundred years from now your great great great granddaughter will buy an ice > cream cone at a movie called "Mars on John Carter". But I don't understand > how any of this is supposed to make the "free will" noise less idiotic. > > 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.
