From: Bantz, Michael S \(UMC-Student\) (msbk99@mizzou.edu)
Date: Fri Feb 04 2005 - 17:19:39 MST
"Free will is one of those ideas that is so bad it's not even wrong.
People debate endlessly if people have free will or not without ever
asking what on earth the odd term means, and of course most of the time
it means precisely nothing. Gibberish is not right or wrong, it's just
gibberish."
I'm pretty sure there is some agreement that the concept of freedom entails: a situation where an action comes as a result of a mind rather than merely physical causation by itself. Of course as we well know, Minds are based upon physical causation and use physical causation to perform actions. So, where does one draw the line? Ethics is based upon the idea that the ethical individual could have performed an action different from the one that was actually performed.
I don't how convincing it is, but the movie, "What the bleep do we know?" argues for free will by incorporating quantam physics. The argument is something like this: there are many "realities" and freedom is the act of choosing which reality your subjective consciousness experiences.
I'm particulary unsure that the controversy of free will should be dismissed as gibberish. In fact, I suspect that an understanding of mental construction of "possible realities" will be vital to powerful A.I. theorys.
________________________________
From: owner-sl4@sl4.org on behalf of fudley
Sent: Fri 2/4/2005 10:36 AM
To: SL4
Subject: Re: Ethics and free will
Free will is one of those ideas that is so bad it's not even wrong.
People debate endlessly if people have free will or not without ever
asking what on earth the odd term means, and of course most of the time
it means precisely nothing. Gibberish is not right or wrong, it's just
gibberish.
John K Clark
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 17 2013 - 04:00:50 MDT