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From: rlr@pyuxd.UUCP (Dr. Emmanuel Wu)
Newsgroups: net.philosophy
Subject: Re: freedom and reason (attn russ, rich, & laura)
Message-ID: <883@pyuxd.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 9-Apr-85 12:43:46 EST
Article-I.D.: pyuxd.883
Posted: Tue Apr  9 12:43:46 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 10-Apr-85 06:53:21 EST
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Organization: STRONGARM COLLECTION AGENCY:  We have no slogan
Lines: 54

> People have sent me a lot of mail about this. There seems to be a
> universal misunderstanding of what I said. Most people who have sent me
> mail have sent me mail which interprets my argument as follows:
>	 
>	 people ask ``do I have free will''?
>	 in asking such a question, one presumes that the answer is yes.
>	 therefore, by force of will, the answer is yes.
>	 this argument stinks.
> 
> Well, yes, I agree that this is a lousy argument, but this is not the one
> I was making. I will try to be clearer.
> When I ask ``d o I have free will''? I am implicitly asserting that there
> is something worthwhile about asking questions. After all, I am bothering
> to do this rather than doing something else. The reason that it is good
> to ask questions is that it is a way of acquiring true knowledge. But
> why should true knowledge be of any use to me? Because, the more true
> knowledge I have, the fewer mistakes I should make. Aha. if knowledge
> is important because it enables us to make fewer mistakes, it follows then
> that we *can* make mistakes. In particular, we are free to make choices,
> some of which we would consider mistakes.

How you got from "we *can* make mistakes" to implying "we are free to make
choices, some of which we consdider mistakes" is not at all clear.  We *can*
make mistakes.  Additional knowledge may prevent us from making mistakes by
amending our knowledge base from which our decision-making process makes its
decisions.  But this does not imply anything about the process of choice
being "free".  The knowledge base, the current chemical state of the brain,
results in a "resulting" decision.  The desire to (or not to) increase
one's knowledge base (by asking questions) would also be determined by a
current chemical state.  The willingness to believe and incorporate the
acquired knowledge is determined similarly, as are any preonceptions and
patterns which you might associate the new knowledge with.  Where is the
"free will", the choice, in this?

> If I do not have free will then I cannot ``make a mistake'' -- every thing
> that I do is outside of the realm of personal choice and therefore is
> inevitable. It may be inevitable that certain people speculate on
> whether or not they have free will, of course, but the hard part is
> explaining the great bulk of evidence that seems to indicate that it is
> a good thing to learn since we can avoid making mistakes that way.

All you've shown is that the word "mistake" may be a poor word.  Remember
that it is JUST a word, which is a human label placed on a thing or idea.
If by mistake you mean "an error in judgment resulting in negative
consequences", what caused that error in judgment, if not the current state
of your knowledge base?  Any judgment you make will be the result of a
chemical process based on that state, and thus so will any action you take.
If you're trying to say that because we use the word "mistake", we are
implying "a bad choice that we made", and thus we must have free will,
then I hope I've shown that that's erroneous.  If that's not what you're
saying, I don't understand what you mean.
-- 
Meet the new wave, same as the old wave...
      				Rich Rosen     ihnp4!pyuxd!rlr