Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Warp wrote:
> >   In the physical world as we know it, at macroscopic levels, every action
> > is deterministic: 

> Not really. For example, you cannot play billiards without feedback. Because 
> of the roundness of the balls, every tiny mistake is going to get amplified 
> and magnified. By the time you've taken 15 shots, the accumulated 
> uncertainty would be larger than the diameter of the cue ball. So if you 
> tried to program a robot to play pool by dead reckoning, you're doomed to fail.

  Mass and energy is quantized, and thus there's only a finite number of
ways the balls can act. It doesn't matter how many possibilities there are,
they are still finite.

  Of course if we start measuring their physical properties at atomic
accuracy, we may end up having random variation due to quantum phenomena,
but that's exactly what I was saying in my original post.

> >   Now we come to the philosophical concept of human free choice. By its
> > very definition free choice is necessarily something which transcends both
> > deterministic and random behavior. In other words, free choice can change
> > a deterministic chain of events non-randomly. Thus it overrides both
> > determinism at macroscopic levels and randomness at quantum levels.

> If that's how you define it, yes.  I think you've defined yourself into a 
> corner, tho.

  I define it that way because I don't consider events which are simply a
consequence of deterministic and random events to be "making a choice".
They are consequences, not choices.

> I think the first problem comes from defining "free will" as being able to 
> make a choice that's neither deterministic nor random. (I'd say "not 
> deterministic but controllable" or something, perhaps.) This is a "mu" kind 
> of question, because you haven't said what it means to make a choice.

  What do you mean? Of course I did, and in a rather simple way at that:
Making a choice is changing a deterministic chain of events in a non-random
way.

  In other words, a deterministic chain of events is affected, broken,
changed, resulting in a completely new chain of events which wouldn't have
happened if this choice hadn't been made, but this change was not due to
quantum (or any other unpredictable) randomness, but rather because of the
will of a sentient, intelligent being. This choice was not simply a
consequence of earlier events or quantum randomness. In other words, a
sentient being is not completely bound by the laws of physics, but can
affect outcomes in ways which are not determined by these laws.

  Free choice is what would make sentient beings different from inanimate
objects. If we are completely bound to physics, then we are, at its core,
just inanimate objects with no true free will. Everything we do is just a
direct consequence of past events and quantum randomness. The chains of
events may be really, really complicated, but nevertheless just physical
consequences, not choices.

  Of course I'm not saying that there's an inherent problem with that.
If I'm happy even knowing that my choices are just consequences, then what
does it matter? It's not like this knowledge would change my life in any way.

> Hence, in my take, if everything *were* deterministic, but still to 
> complicated to predict what someone else might do, then that person has free 
> will.

  I find it a rather odd definition. "If the consequences are too complicated
to be predicted by us, then it's free will acting there."

  That means that what constitutes free will would change over time, as our
ability to predict physical events gets increased.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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