On 12 Jul 2012, at 22:08, meekerdb wrote:
On 7/12/2012 12:27 PM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:
On 11.07.2012 18:21 John Clark said the following:
On Tue, Jul 10, 2012 Evgenii Rudnyi<use...@rudnyi.ru> wrote:
I understand but the question in principle still remains. Who
play the
chess, I or the M-theory?
There is no logical reason to think those two ways of explaining the
same phenomenon are incompatible. It's true that the reason a toy
balloon doesn't collapse is that the momentum of gas atoms inside
the
balloon impacting the surface is greater than or equal to that of
the
gas atoms outside the balloon impacting the surface, but it's also
true that the reason is just that the pressure inside is greater.
Sometimes humans find that a high level description and explanation
is more useful and sometimes they do not. Trying to understand how
hurricanes work by looking at the level of atoms would not be very
enlightening, and super-strings would be even less helpful.
John K Clark
I have read once Elbow Room by Dennett to understand how free will
could be compatible with determinism. Yet, I have not understood
it. I have to work it out.
Evgenii
In Dennett's conception 'free will' is just a marker for
responsibility; hence his aphorism, "You can avoid responsibility
for everything if you just make yourself small enough." So where
one person might say, "Yes, it was me. I did it." another might say,
"I didn't do it of my own free will. I was coerced by threats of
being fired." and yet another might say, "I didn't do it. It was
just the result of deterministic or random physical processes in my
brain and body."
The last answer does not make sense. He could have said : "I didn't do
it, God did it". He imposes his philosophical conception on the
situation. But there is no problem, we can send him in jail, and
assure him that we too just obey the same equation.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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