On Tue, Sep 09, 2008 at 01:21:43PM -0500, Jason Resch wrote:
> One of the concerns people have with free will or the lack thereof is that
> if physics is deterministic, one's future actions can predicted beforehand,
> without them even having to exist. However, an interesting consequence of
> computationalism is this: One's future actions cannot be predicted without a
> simulation that goes into enough detail to instantiate that person's
> consciousness. As conscious creatures, our wills cannot be calculated
> without our consciousness being invoked by the calculations, just as the
> physics of this universe is doing now.
Sorry I haven't been following the thread, but I assume people have
also brought up issues like measurement error, sensitive dependence
on initial conditions and quantum uncertainty.
The next question I would have is: assuming such a program could
be fully realized and accurately initialized, would it have to have a
partitioned structure which would simulate the environment as well
as the internal mind of the individual, and would such a program
be capable of deducing logical shortcuts to the internal's next
state which are not already incorporated into the internal (and our
biological neural nets) at the corresponding point in "time".
Are we in some logical way an optimal expression of ourselves?
If so, it would seem we have free will at least in the sense of not
being predictable.
Rich
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Received on Tue Sep 09 2008 - 16:08:25 PDT