NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #27/NN_1992_27.iso/spool/talk/philosop/misc/2486

Internet Message Format | 1992-11-15 | 3.7 KB

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From: [e-mail] (Laurence James Edwards)
Subject: Re: FREE WILL 2: Neither a Determinist nor an Indeterminist be.
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Sender: [e-mail] (Mr News)
Organization: DSG, Stanford University, CA 94305, USA
References: <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]>
Date: Mon, 16 Nov 92 01:19:04 GMT
Lines: 64

In article <[e-mail]>, [e-mail] (Neil Rickert) writes:
|> [....]
|> Yes.  I understood that point completely.  I was making the point that
|> there may not be any well defined notion of free will.  There is no
|> particular reason to believe it can be well defined.

Fine, I doubt that it can be also ... that was one of my points.

|> [....]
|> I most certainly do not equate free will with non-determinism.  On the
|> other hand, I don't believe determinism is well defined either.

Hmm, well that may be true, what do you have in mind here?

|> [....]
|> >First of all, I meant from the physicists point of view, second even in
|> >ordinary day to day experience there are many things which we cannot
|> >predict exactly ... weather for instance.
|>
|> You are confusing determinism with predictability.

Nope.
A deterministic system is predictable ... if a system is not predictable to
an observer then from the observers point of view it is non-deterministic.

|>  In order for something
|> such as the weather to be predictable, you need (a) an adequate degree
|> of determinism, and (b) sufficient data about the initial conditions
|> which determine the resulting effects.  With phenomena such as weather
|> it is surely (b) which fails, so it does not provide any good evidence
|> for or against determinism.

See above.

|> >|> In what sense does it become meaningless on close examination?  To
|> >|> rephrase this question, isn't it true that if, on close examination we
|> >|> found we did not have free will, then we would also find we were incapable
|> >|> of doing this close examination?  This is, of course, somewhat paradoxical.
|> >
|> >Here I meant on close examination of the intuitive notion of free will
|> >not on close examination of human being ... e.g. how do you experimentally
|> >distinguish between some entity that makes decisions on the basis of
|> >"free will" and one that makes decisions based on random events?
|>
|> You don't make such a distinction.  It doesn't matter whether you are
|> talking about the intuitive notion of free will, or some more fundamental
|> notion of free will, it is still impossible to determine experimentally
|> that we do have free will.  But this does not mean that we don't have
|> free will.

Couple of things; 1) you seem to be contradicting an earlier statement
you made about "our impression of free will", 2) there is no "more
fundamental notion" of free will than our intuitive notion.

We would not consider some random process to have free will, yet we cannot
distinguish through observation between a non-deterministic system and one that
has free will. For this reason, and others, I think or our notion of free will
is ill-defined. In some super set of our observable universe there may be some
entity that can make this distinction and resolve some of the semantic
difficulties (just as quantum mechanics may "really" be deterministic in some
super universe) but for us the question of whether we have free will or not is
meaningless (IMO).

Larry Edwards