On Sun, Jul 22, 2012 at 6:27 AM, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be>
wrote:
> The fact that consciousness and free will can be justified or
explained, in some way, in a deterministic framework, does not make
those concepts referring to something unreal.
True. Unicorns and Harry Potter are unreal but the words refer to
something, just something that does not happen to exist; but "free
will" refers to nothing. Fiction is not gibberish, but free will is,
it would need to become much more substantial before it could rise to
the level of myth.
Again you talk about incompatibilistr free will, which I agree is or
can be gibberish. You just evade the definition of free will that I
gave to you, and I don't insist on the "free" prefix which I take as an
emphasis only.
> It does not elevate the "incompatibilist" notion of free will above
gibberish, but this we already agreed on. It just define free will
for the compatibilist, and I don't see why you believe that this is
gibberish (as opposed to incompatibilist free will).
Is it really true that you don't see this? And I don't give a damn if
its "compatibilist" or "incompatibilist" (whatever the hell that
means),
Those are the standard terms used in the literature.
we have been debating this for months and in all that time you have
not provided one clear example of something that neither did nor did
not happen for a reason, and yet you ask me to believe you're puzzled
why I don't accept all your verbiage about the "free will" noise.
Everything happens for a reason. Again, I have to insist that I defend
a notion of compatibilist free will. The fact that someone can
determine in advance what I will do does NOT entails that I am not
doing it with my own (free) will, for I have no access to the reason of
such act. We are again in a pure vocabulary discussion, evanding the
notion.
You do the same mistake than the one again the term "theology": you
limit the sense of the notion to the sense given in some theory,
instead of searching definition and theories which makes sense of those
concept. This is called reductionist thinking, and if you apply it in
the comp theory, once you get it, such reductionism entails that
everything is gibberish, except 0, s(0), s(s(0)), ....
I find your lack of understanding incomprehensible, and that word has
a meaning.
Nobody understood your "point" making you stop in UDA-step-3, and why
you don't tackle step 4.
But everybody can understand the notion of compatibilist free will, as
I define it. Such conception is not mine, and similar versions exist in
the literature.
> you are too quick to sum up the definition of free will by "we don't
know what we don't know", for, as you admit yourself, the absence of
knowledge, in this setting, is a consequence of Turing-like form of
indeterminacy, which is not tautological, and that was my point that I
share with Popper and Good.
Obviously we don't know what the result of a calculation will be until
we finish the calculation,
Certainly not "for all" computations, of course.
and thanks to Turing we've known for 75 years that in general there is
no way to know if the calculation will ever even be finished, so for
both reasons we have a feeling of uncertainty about what we will do
next, a feeling that the unpredictable external environment only
emphasizes. So regarding the "free will" noise, can you think of one
thing that Popper or Good or any other philosopher has added to this
that was worth more than a bucket of warm spit?
From this and Good's definition, we (Me, Pooper) can show that free
will and thus consciousness has an important role: the role of speeding
up the computation in the environment. In some paper Good will even
(re)define free will by that machine's speeding up ability. This can be
used to explain the role of consciousness in the Darwinian context.
This is recovered through the use of the modal logics of machine's
self-reference and their modal variants.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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