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- Path: sparky!uunet!gatech!pitt.edu!tmkst6
- From: tmkst6+@pitt.edu (Theodore M Kostek)
- Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc
- Subject: Re: Free will
- Message-ID: <3821@blue.cis.pitt.edu.UUCP>
- Date: 27 Jul 92 20:31:09 GMT
- References: <1992Jul20.051558.14985@news.eng.convex.com> <LEE.92Jul21150620@meercat.wang.com> <1992Jul21.200956.13790@news.eng.convex.com>
- Sender: news+@pitt.edu
- Distribution: usa
- Organization: University of Pittsburgh
- Lines: 47
-
- In article <1992Jul21.200956.13790@news.eng.convex.com> cash@convex.com (Peter Cash) writes:
- >In article <LEE.92Jul21150620@meercat.wang.com> lee@wang.com (Lee Story) writes:
- >>In article <1992Jul20.051558.14985@news.eng.convex.com> cash@convex.com (Peter Cash) writes:
- >...
- >> Yes, I share your puzzlement. I simply don't understand how people can
- >> discuss "free will" in this thread without ever telling anyone what it is,
- >> and I have no idea whatever what physics has to do with this "free will".
- >
- >Well if the question is so simple, then why don't you answer it? What _is_
- >"free will"? I've already admitted that _I_ don't know what you're talking
- >about--could it be you don't either?
- >
-
- Well, since I was the one who started this whole free will thing, I guess
- I should try shed some light on what I meant by it.
-
- As I think about it, free will wasn't really exactly what I was asking.
- A better (maybe :| )way to ask my question would be as follows: is
- there something special about 'me' such that what I do is does not
- necsessarily follow from a purely scientific, physical description of me
- and my surroundings.
-
- What I mean is, when I make a decision (blue or green shirt today) is
- there something special thing (spirit, soul, holoistic interpretation
- of a physical human being) that makes the choice, or is it a set of
- (non-linear, chaotic) equations. Of course there are lots of ideas
- here that could use further clarification, but I hope that some
- sort of common sense notions can suffice. (I kinda doubt it, though.)
-
- More succinctly, am I more than the sum of my physics/chemistry/biology.
- In the course of trying to sort this out with a friend of mine, he said
- "No, you don't have 'free will', physics dictates/describes everything, but
- that's no way to live a life."
-
- Several people have said that I should look into chaos theory, but
- I think that by reworking the question I have made this irrelvant.
- Several other people pointed out that at the microscopic scale many
- events are only probablistic. I'm not entirely sure how I think this
- affects things, but I tend to think it doesn't matter since over the
- large samples I would think that it would average out.
-
- Feel free to let me know if I have made some glaring error; but of
- course, as shown by previous experience, you don't have a problem with
- that.
-
-
- TEd
-