Re: Decision theory

From: Gilles HENRI <Gilles.Henri.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Fri, 8 Jan 1999 09:58:40 +0100

For most people, the idea of free will means that human being can evolve
differently from what is predicted by physical laws. You can adopt another
definition, but I think this is the most widespread opinion.
So this is a perfectly well-posed question: assume you know the initial
state of the Universe, containing some human beings, and let it evolve by
the application of physical laws, considering the human beings merely as a
collection of particles. Do you expect to reproduce the real, or at least a
realistic evolution, including the apparition of creative processes,
apparent choices, etc..?
Of course both theory of chaos and QM tell us that the simulation of the
exact evolution is hopeless. However they still allow predictions of
probability. So it is *in principle* possible to test whether these
probabilities are correctly predicted given initial conditions (much like
meteorology). As this probabilistic behavior is already observed for
electrons and for classical simple chaotic systems, it has nothing to do
with free will as defined above. Free will could be proven only if one
could prove that the real human behaviour definitely contradicts the
prediction of physical laws, much like QM is believed to be true only
because experiments definitely contradict the predictions of CM.

 If you think human behaviour is correctly reproduced by (probabilistic)
physical laws, free will is only an image for the natural evolution of a
very complex information handling system, our brain.

Gilles
Received on Fri Jan 08 1999 - 01:00:36 PST