On Fri, Aug 10, 2012 at 12:22:06PM -0400, John Clark wrote: > On Thu, Aug 9, 2012 Russell Standish <li...@hpcoders.com.au> wrote: > > > "Free will is the ability to do something stupid". > > > > Well OK, but there sure as hell is a lot of free will going around these > days, even a pair of dice can be pretty stupid, the smart thing for it to > do would be to come up with a 7, but sometimes it comes up with a 2 even > though that number is 6 times less likely. Only a idiot would pick 2 but > sometimes the dice does. As Homer Simpson would say "Stupid dice". > > > Roulette wheels do what they do, they never do anything different. > > > > Sure they do, sometimes they produce a 12 and sometimes they produce a 21. > > John K Clark >
In both your examples, (dice and roulette wheels), they always do something stupid (generate a random number). There is no choice in their actions, so it is senseless to assign agency to them. There is no optimisation of utility. I think you may be deliberately taking my statement out of context. Nevertheless, randomness is a key component of free will. -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- 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.
