Re: Free will in MWI
On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 3:07 AM, meekerdb wrote: > I agree with that point. But I also wanted to make the point that there > is social concept of free will that has to do with responsibility, and it > is compatible with different dualist, determinist, and non-deterministic > concepts of will, "free" and otherwise. > Yes, and responsability is linked with punishment which in turn is linked with learning and regulating behavior. It's all social. It is revealing that when discussing free will, most examples are moral situations. Very rarely free will is exemplified with choosing going to the movies or going to the theather. Ricardo. -- 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.
Conscious Will and Responsibility: A Tribute to Benjamin Libet
Below there is a message from Facebook where his author briefly describes a book with papers about Libet's experiment. I guess that this should be useful for discussions about free will. Evgenii --- Review :Conscious Will and Responsibility: A Tribute to Benjamin Libet The editors of this work are well-chosen. Walter Sinnot-Armstrong is a well known philosopher who in the past has shown a healthy scepticism towards many philosophical views on time and free will. Lynn Nadel is a psychologist who specializes in memory, and has, for example, investigated the role of the hippocampus in memory formation. This all implies careful selection of current work on the Libet problem, sometimes known in the vernacular as the "Libet half-second". My own interests are less in the immediate moral or ethical implications of Libet's findings, but more deeply into how Libet's discovery can and has affected current ideas on the mind, and on what the actual mechanisms are. The important results of Banks and Isham, of Hallett, Haynes, Haggard and Pockett, and of many other present day luminaries are discussed in some detail, often by the authors themselves. For anyone who wants to learn recent work on the Libet problem, many of the answers are in this book,which can reasonably be recommended to any appropriate advanced student and to good libraries for reference. Clearly the very latest papers, such as the most recent work of Isham and Geng, may not have had time to appear, and a few people like Lau and Mukamel are not actual authors here but some of their results are referred to therein. My own studies, which allow tensed as well as tenseless time, do also relate to the work of other authors like Adamatzky, Elze, Super and Romeo, but then I have a slightly different slant on the subject, as referred to in my recent work in http://ttjohn.blogspot.in/2012/05/strange-results-of-libet-experiments.html my website ifsgoa.com and my Facebook group http://www.facebook.com/groups/ifsgoa/ and of course my new book on physics, neuroscience and time: http://amzn.to/zHtsxy http://bit.ly/xR8FgF details, reviewers http://bit.ly/A2eaOe This book is highly recommended to anyone interested in philosophy, neuroscience and particularly in the Libet half-second at an advanced scientific level. Dr. John Yates, Institute for Fundamental Studies, Goa, Mumbai and London. -- 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.
Re: Why is there something rather than nothing?
Bruno and Ricardo:
...unless you remove the "boundries" as well - I think.
That would end up for "nothing" with a POINT, which is still a point and
not nothing. (If you eliminate the point???)
John M
On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 2:55 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>
> On 09 May 2012, at 21:39, R AM wrote:
>
>
>
> On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 8:23 PM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>
>>
>> On 09 May 2012, at 17:09, R AM wrote:
>>
>>
>> "nothing" could also be obtained by removing the curly brackets from the
>> empty set {}.
>>
>>
>> N... Some bit of blank remains. If it was written on hemp, you could
>> smoke it. That's not nothing!
>>
>> Don't confuse the notion and the symbols used to point to the notion.
>> Which you did, inadvertently I guess.
>>
>
> I was using the analogy between items contained in sets and things
> contained in bags. The curly brackets would represent the bags. Removing
> things from a bag leaves it empty. Removing the bag leaves ... nothing.
>
>
> Nothing in the universe of sets. But this makes not much sense. And you
> have still an empty universe. Then you will tell me to remove all
> universes, but you will still get an empty multiverse. Oh, you can get rid
> of all multiverses, but you will still have an empty multi-multiverse. Oh,
> you can reiterate this in the transfinite, ... but you need some rich
> theory at the metalevel, then. Absolute nothingness does not make sense in
> my opinion.
>
>
>
>
> Sure, like 0 is some sort of nothing in Number theory, and like quantum
>> vacuum is some sort of nothing in QM. Nothing is a theory dependent notion.
>> (Not so for the notion of computable functions).
>>
>
> Yes, these concrete nothings are well behaved, unlike the absolute
> nothing, which we don't know what rules it obey (in case it is a meaningful
> concept, which it might not be).
>
>
> OK.
>
>
>
>
>
>> Extensionally, the UD is a function from nothing (no inputs) to
>> nothing (no outputs), but then what a worker!
>>
>> Extensionally it belongs to { } ^ { }. It is a function from { } to { }.
>>
>
> But I guess that is because the UD generates internally all possible
> inputs for all possible programs, isn't it.
>
>
> Right.
>
> Bruno
>
>
>
> Ricardo.
>
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> http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
>
>
>
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Re: Free will in MWI
Stathis Papaioannou wrote > My definition: free will is when you're not sure you're going to do > something until you've done it. > > On Tue, May 8, meekerdb wrote: > So if carefully weigh my options and decide on one it's not free will? > You don't know what the outcome all those options will have on you until you have finished weighing the options and you will know you have completely finished when you act. > >I'd say free will is making any choice that is not coerced by another > agent. > So you say the noise "free will" means sometimes being able to do what we want to do, but then we don't have free will most of the time because most of the time we can not do exactly what we want to do, we can't even think what we want to think all the time; nobody wants to think sad depressing thoughts but we often think them nevertheless. And I don't see why coercion is limited to another agent, if I want to go from point X to Point Y in the shortest path a brick wall will prevent me from doing so just as effectively as a large man with a large club. And of course if there was a reason for making the choice you did then it was deterministic and if there was no reason for making the choice then it was random. 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.
Re: Free will in MWI
On 5/10/2012 1:08 PM, John Clark wrote: Stathis Papaioannou wrote > My definition: free will is when you're not sure you're going to do something until you've done it. So by your definition is a there ever a time when you're not exercising free will? On Tue, May 8, meekerdb mailto:meeke...@verizon.net>> wrote: > So if carefully weigh my options and decide on one it's not free will? You don't know what the outcome all those options will have on you until you have finished weighing the options and you will know you have completely finished when you act. >I'd say free will is making any choice that is not coerced by another agent. So you say the noise "free will" means sometimes being able to do what we want to do, That isn't what I said. I said that sometimes we decide what we're going to do before we do it and so, by your definition, we're exercising free will. Now you may say we're not *sure* we're going to do it until we've done it. But that's rather like just giving a definition and then just assuming it's never satisfied. Sometimes we do what we planned to do so what does it mean to say we weren't sure even though we thought we were? but then we don't have free will most of the time because most of the time we can not do exactly what we want to do, we can't even think what we want to think all the time; nobody wants to think sad depressing thoughts but we often think them nevertheless. And I don't see why coercion is limited to another agent, It's just a definition. Being obstructed by physics isn't coercion, being threatened by a guy with a gun is because presumably he has some reasons different from yours. if I want to go from point X to Point Y in the shortest path a brick wall will prevent me from doing so just as effectively as a large man with a large club. And of course if there was a reason for making the choice you did then it was deterministic and if there was no reason for making the choice then it was random. Coerced/free is a social or legal dichotomy. It admits of degrees. It's orthogonal to deterministic/random. Brent 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.
