Norman Samish wrote:
>But what about the sufferers of schizophrenia who Stathis Papaioannou
>referred to? They exercise self-determination, and their mental state is
>such that their actions, at least in some cases, are completely
>predictable.
>Do they have free will?
>
>Another example might be a self-aware computer of the future that would be
>programmed to have predictable actions as well as self-determination.
>Would
>it have free will?
>
>In both cases, the actions of the Self-Aware Organism are predictable,
>hence
>their will is not free. They are bound by their destiny.
>
>To have free will, the actions of a SAO cannot be completely predictable.
>To be free of complete predictability, at least some of the SAO's actions
>must ultimately depend on some kind of random event. At the most
>fundamental level, this must be quantum indeterminacy.
It may be the case that quantum indeterminacy adds a random element which
contributes to our experience of free will, but you are dismissing the other
theoretical possibility, which is that our brains are vastly, chaotically
and perhaps even intractably complex, but nonetheless completely
deterministic machines. We would then still believe that we had "free will"
, even though in reality we are all blindly following a predetermined
script. How could we possibly know that this is not what is in fact
happening?
--Stathis Papaioannou
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Received on Mon Apr 11 2005 - 08:50:09 PDT