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From: ellis@spar.UUCP (Michael Ellis)
Newsgroups: net.philosophy
Subject: Self Imprisonment
Message-ID: <171@spar.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 9-Apr-85 14:02:11 EST
Article-I.D.: spar.171
Posted: Tue Apr  9 14:02:11 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 12-Apr-85 06:35:31 EST
References: <362@aesat.UUCP> <5272@utzoo.UUCP> <137@ubvax.UUCP> <5343@utzoo.UUCP>
Reply-To: ellis@spar.UUCP (Michael Ellis)
Organization: Schlumberger Palo Alto Research, CA
Lines: 34

>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.
>
>Laura Creighton

    Laura, I cannot believe a person as otherwise well-read as you
    seem to be still believes that the world is deterministic,
    or that there is past/future symmetry that makes the
    future `unalterable' in the same sense as the past is.
    
    This comment is equally directed at Rich Rosen.

    At the risk of boring this newsgroup by repeating myself, please
    note that:

	THERE IS NOTHING DETERMINISTIC IN THIS UNIVERSE

    Check out any text in quantum mechanics. As for the broken-ness
    of past/future symmetry, have you read Ilya Prigogine's `Order
    out of Chaos'?

    None of this PROVES free-will, but it sure as hell creates the
    possibility of a universe in which free will is allowed to exist.

    Your insistence on imagining that everything is inevitable in
    spite the enormous weight of scientific evidence that would
    indicate otherwise strikes me as almost Sargentian self-torture.

		khronos ouketi estai
-michael