From: fudley (fuddley@fastmail.fm)
Date: Sun Dec 25 2005 - 00:20:12 MST
On Sat, 24 Dec 2005 "Thomas Buckner"
> Most people, in discussing free will, assume
> it's boolean: either you have 'it' or you don't.
I assume that everything, absolutely everything happens because of cause
and effect OR it doesn’t happen because of cause and effect. And if it
doesn’t there is a simple word to describe it, random.
> I prefer to think about "degrees of freedom"
A tiny particle being bounced around by random Brownian motion has lots
of freedom, it moves in lots of directions but there is not much point
to it.
> So think of that as a metaphor for the possible
> choices and mental states a given entity can
> have.
When I make a choice people ask me why I chose what I did, what were my
reasons, what CAUSED me to do that. If I tell them I had no reason at
all for making that choice people tend to think I’m a bit dim.
> They have no mental states and only behave
> according to what physics and chemistry
> make them do.
Are you saying biology violates the laws of physics and chemistry?
Sounds like a step back to medieval times.
> Are we therefore to say that a rat has zero free will?
No. Like us it takes the rat 5 minutes to compute what it will do 5
minutes from now, like us it is saying to himself “I don’t know what
I’ll do, I haven’t decided yet”.
> that's the problem with denying free will
> entirely; you're telling people they have
> no feelings, no inner lives no choice.
Huh? How do you figure that? All the time we tell our inner self “I
haven’t decided which choice to make yet, I want to be happy and I don’t
know if A or B will make me happier, I’ll have to think about it, I’ll
have to compute it”.
John K Clark
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