Free will
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From: Don Geddis on 23 May 2010 23:47 Raffael Cavallaro <raffaelcavallaro(a)pas.despam.s.il.vous.plait.mac.com> wrote on Sun, 23 May 2010: > On 2010-05-22 10:59:31 -0400, Don Geddis said: >> This is what people generally mean by "free will", as contrasted with an >> entity making decisions which are coerced by the goals of some different >> entity. > > [...] an extra-physical immortal soul capable of moral choice. This is > what they mean by free will, not some cut-down deterministic thing. So you're actually just equating a "soul" with "free will"? You think it's a meaningless question to ask, "could humans lack free will but still have a soul?" Or to ask, "could humans still have free will, even if they lacked a soul?" I really don't think your strawman is as mainstream as you believe. Yes, souls and free will are closely tied in many people's minds. But even for them, free will is just one property of the soul, among many others (such as eternal existence). It still makes sense to consider that property, even independent of any soul, even if most people can't yet conceive what that might mean. We, here, can discuss that same property they are talking about, even in the absence of a soul, even if many of those other people find the idea absurd. It's simply not the case that free will is identical to having a soul, even among people who believe that one is a prerequisite to the other. We can discuss what they think free will _means_, separately from the claim of whether a soul is required to have it. -- Don _______________________________________________________________________________ Don Geddis http://don.geddis.org/ don(a)geddis.org Sign outside the Fountain of Youth Health Spa in Salt Lake City: Are You Fat And Ugly? Do You Want To Be Just Ugly? Memberships Available Now.
From: Raffael Cavallaro on 24 May 2010 01:08 On 2010-05-23 23:47:17 -0400, Don Geddis said: > I really don't think your strawman is as mainstream as you believe. Well, we haven't even started counting Islam, Hinduism, and other religions that believe in a non-physical, immortal soul. I think you wildly underestimate the proportion of humanity that believes they themselves are, in essence, non-physical. They attribute their free will to this non-physical soul/atman or whatever their tradition calls it, not physics, deterministic or otherwise. warmest regards, Ralph -- Raffael Cavallaro
From: Pascal J. Bourguignon on 24 May 2010 03:30 Don Geddis <don(a)geddis.org> writes: > But > even for them, free will is just one property of the soul, among many > others (such as eternal existence). This is an error. Well, it is explicable, because of the context. But free will is not a property of the soul, it's a property of the association between the soul and God. Since God is a singleton you have the impression it's a property of the soul, but it is not. +---------+ * 1 +-------------------+ | Soul |------------------------------| God {singleton} | +---------+ \/ +-------------------+ | 0..1 +------------------+ | +------------------+ | | freeWill := true | | +------------------+ | | 0..1 +--------+ | Body | +--------+ -- __Pascal Bourguignon__ http://www.informatimago.com/
From: Nick Keighley on 24 May 2010 04:10 On 23 May, 18:03, RG <rNOSPA...(a)flownet.com> wrote: > In article <htbh72$vk...(a)news.eternal-september.org>, > Raffael Cavallaro > <raffaelcavall...(a)pas.despam.s.il.vous.plait.mac.com> wrote: > > On 2010-05-22 12:20:24 -0400, RG said: > > >> This may be a somewhat subtle point. When someone claims (as I do not) > > >> that we are zombies they are claiming that our subjective experience is > > >> not real. I am not denying that our subjective experience is real. > > > > That is ironic, because all the scientific evidence indicates that it is > > > in fact not real. > > > On the contrary, science can have nothing whatsoever to say on the > > existence or non-existence of subjective experience, since science > > rests logically on subjective experience, on awareness. Science is > > built up from observation and logic, and observation *is* subjective > > experience, awareness. > > Ah. Now I understand why you've been consistently ignoring the point I > keep making about objective reality being fundamentally quantum in > nature. It's because you really don't understand this point. > Observation is not subjective experience, it is entanglement. See: > > http://www.flownet.com/ron/QM.pdf > > Or David Deutsch's book "The Fabric of Reality" for a more complete > treatment. > > > What we call objective data are nothing more > > than subjective experiences that correlate well between individuals - > > i.e., subjective observations that can be replicated are objective > > data. So far from being unreal, subjective awareness is a fundamental > > ontological category of existence. No matter how complex the apparatus > > of a scientific experiment, there is no observation until a person or > > persons become aware of the output or result of that apparatus.[1] > ... > > [1] yes, this also includes thought-experiment robots capable of > > recapitulating all of science from scratch. Their results are not > > results until you or I or some other person is aware of these results. > > No, you are simply flat-out wrong about this, I'm glad to hear it, it always sounded like rubbish. So is the Copenhagen interpretation dead or did it just never say what some people claimed it did? I could never understand how human conciousness could have some sort of magic effect on the world around us. And wonder of wonders all those dodgy books linking QM with eastern mysticism were (as i suspected all along), bollocks. > at least from the point of > view of contemporary science. It's ironic that you, who stand so > strongly on scientific principle, should be advancing a point of view > that has been so thoroughly discredited by science. The idea that > humans have some sort of privileged status in the scheme of things, even > in the quantum mechanical scheme of things, has been discredited every > bit as thoroughly as creationism. how? I mean I'm glad to hear it but it always seemed a bit like "if a tree falls in a forsts and no one hears it, does it actually fall?". "does the wave form collapse if no one is observing it?". How do you *prove* this is nonsense? Or is that this position simply has no observable consequences. Are we in EPR and Bell territory now? Wasn't Penrose "the emporer's new mind" arguing relativly recently that there *was* something special about human conciousness? > > This is why your argument about the spatiotemporal asymmetry of > > subjective experience being at odds with other physical laws is > > unnecessary - we never get science started without taking awareness as > > axiomatic; we have QM because it is built on the logical foundation of > > subjective experience. Since you don't need to/can't prove an axiom of > > a logical system, you don't need to/can't prove awareness exists. Nor, > > having assumed it does exist to get things rolling, can you disprove > > it. At most you can show that the whole system is logically > > inconsistent, but this would bring all of science down, not subjective > > awareness. > > No, no, and no. All you need to do science is classically correlated > measurements, which includes the states of computing machines and > reports of subjective experience by humans. And classically correlated > measurements arise as a nearly exact approximation to quantum theory > when dealing with large systems of mutually entangled particles. There > is no need to get metaphysical to do science, just as there is no need > to get metaphysical to advance you political agenda. But you at least have to accept there's a universe out there to observe. A pretty reasonable assumption in my view and descriptions of the physical universe then follow on from that. > Go read my paper, or Deutsch's book, or Eliezer Yudkowski's writings on > QM. All of these are easily accessible, and the topic is much to > complicated (to say nothing of off-topic) to recapitulate here.
From: Nick Keighley on 24 May 2010 04:21
On 23 May, 00:28, Don Geddis <d...(a)geddis.org> wrote: > RG <rNOSPA...(a)flownet.com> wrote on Sat, 22 May 2010: > > As Don said, randomness is a red herring. The crucial elements are 1) > > some decision making mechanism with 2) goals and/or desires and 3) > > insufficient computing power to introspectively predict its own > > behavior in advance of actually making a decision. Or something like > > that. Maybe I should let Don make his own arguments. I seem to be > > making a mess of it. > > Not this time! It all sounds good to me. > > (By the way, in case you're curious: there's more than just > "insufficient computing power" which prevents an entity from predicting > its own decision, prior to making its decision. There's actually an > introspective, reflective, "catch". Ironically, it might be possible > for everybody else in the world to figure out what your decision is > going to be before you make it -- but not for you, yourself! Think > about trying to write a program that does reasoning/planning. Say you > finish version 1. You run it, and it makes some decision. Now you want > the program to figure out what decision its going to make, before it > makes it. How do you do that? Well, you enhance your program to > include a model of itself, and have your program run the model first, > before "actually" making a decision. But wait a minute, now. You now > have version 2 of the program, but the model inside is only a model of > version 1. Your program's model can predict what decision version 1 > would have made ... but now the program itself is version 2, not version > 1, and nothing forces it to make the same decision this time. For > example, it may have a goal of being ornery, and not wanting to be able > to predict its own behavior. ooh! I like this,the godelerisation of the human will! Turings result applied to the soul. > Imagine, for example, that it decided > "whatever my internal model returns as a decision -- I'm going to pick > the opposite, for my real decision!". This is why decision-making > programs [and people] have "free will". Because nothing stops the > program from making whatever decision it wants, including deciding the > opposite of whatever its model says it is going to decide. That's > basically a reductio proof by contradiction, to show that it is not > possible, in general, for a system to always correctly predict its > future behavior. Even in a deterministic world, even if outsiders CAN > predict its behavior! The system itself can't know [in general] what > decision it will make, until it actually makes the decision. Hence, > free will. You will NEVER be in a situation where someone is able to > communicate to you, "in the future you will decide A instead of B", and > somehow find yourself unable to change that decision ["not have free > will"]. The very act of communicating the supposed future decision, > puts you in a different information state than you were before you > received that communication. And a decision process can of course come > to a different decision if it has different information. That's real > free will. Note that it doesn't depend on limited compuatational > resources, it doesn't depend on a soul, and it doesn't depend on randomness.) |