Gisle Tangenes wrote:
>If by free will you mean only your own ability to make decisions, it's hard
>to see how determinism could hamper it. My oven is itself producing heat
>however much it was predetermined. Similarly, you can make decisions even
>though the content of those decisions are predetermined by the laws and
>constants of physics: All it takes is for your option set to be >1 in the
>relevant situations. Thus free will as decision-making is completely
>possible also in a deterministic single universe, and there should be no
>need to invoke MW.
I definitely agree with this. Those interested in the reasons why can
search the archive with the key word "free will" or "clinton" for
some of my old posts on that subject.
I agree that free will has something to do with downward causation, and
I think our *feeling* of free will is linked to the fact that we cannot
be aware of the way the downward causation proceeds, but also that
we can be aware that we cannot be aware of such links.
>QM does not
>take you from "is" to "ought" any more than do General Relativity or
>Thermodynamics.
OK. Note that QM does take us from "is" to "could" and, amazingly,
from "could" to "is".
Bruno
Bruno MARCHAL Phone : +32 (0)2 650 27 11
Universite Libre Fax : +32 (0)2 650 27 15
de Bruxelles
Avenue F.D. Roosevelt, 50 IRIDIA, CP 194/6
B-1050 BRUSSELS Email : marchal.domain.name.hidden
Belgium URL :
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal
Received on Wed Dec 15 1999 - 03:34:25 PST