Brent Meeker writes:
> Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
> >
> >
> > Tom Caylor writes (in response to Marvin Minsky):
> >
> >> Regarding Stathis' question to you about truth, your calling the idea
> >> of believing unsound seems to imply that you are assuming that there is
> >> no truth that we can discover. But on the other hand, if there is no
> >> discoverable truth, then how can we know that something, like the
> >> existence of freedom of will, is false?
> >
> > That's easy: it's logically impossible. When I make a decision, although
> > I take all the evidence into account, and I know I am more likely to
> > decide one way rather than another due to my past experiences and due to
> > the way my brain works, ultimately I feel that I have the freedom to
> > overcome these factors and decide "freely". But neither do I feel that
> > this free decision will be something random: I'm not mentally tossing a
> > coin, but choosing according to my beliefs and values. Do you see the
> > contradiction here?
>
> Yes, but it's a contrived contradiction. You have taken "free" to mean independent of you where "you" refers to your past experience, the way your brain works, etc. As Dennett says, that's not a free will worth having.
Indeed, but it's how people often think of free will. It's even how I think of
it, without reflecting on its impossibility.
Stathis Papaioannou
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Received on Wed Dec 27 2006 - 16:33:20 PST