To: TrisB
I reject the notion of free will.... Oh my. Does that mean if I told you to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge, you'd do it? If not, why not?
Thanks for writing, TrisB!
117 posted on
11/08/2006 1:37:06 PM PST by
betty boop
(Beautiful are the things we see...Much the most beautiful those we do not comprehend. -- N. Steensen)
To: betty boop
I'm not sure you have appreciated the extent of the two opposing arguments. To not have free will wouldn't stop you from making choices. I would not jump because I calculate it to be an unfavourable outcome. I base a decision upon my knowledge and experience. Then again, computers are argued do the same every day, producing outcomes based on sensory information and memory. The burden of evidence lies on how these decision-making processes differ. I would argue they don't in principle.
We can learn, computers can learn. We can change our minds, computers can change their minds (when further, more detailed, computation is completed - as an analogy to our "thinking things through"). Would "THE TERMINATOR" jump off a cliff if it were raised as one of us with our instinctive drives and social conditioning? If free will is the ability of a physical system to respond to change, then a tree bending in the wind has free will.
I wouldn't agree though - I can't understand how free will can ever arise out of a system of pure ORDER (by definition following physical rules i.e. deterministic) or from CHAOS (where no occurrence has any significance). There is no in-between of order and chaos, any more than there is for up and down. The two can intermingle happily, but this doesn't create new behaviour outside of what the original things do individually (to give an analogy, if you mix pebbles and sand they are still clearly different things and are separable, like a mixture of order and chaos, but if you react two chemicals together you create something new. Mathematically we would say order and chaos commute).
Ok, getting a little deep here, but I'm struggling in retrospect of my young days when I did believe in free will, and now trying desperately to understand what it could possible be, and what would permit it to exist outside of order and chaos.
118 posted on
11/09/2006 8:14:02 AM PST by
TrisB
(Reply to betty boop and khnyny)
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