Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!necntc!linus!mbunix!bwk
From: bwk@mitre-bedford.ARPA (Barry W. Kort)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Free Will & Self-Awareness
Message-ID: <30800@linus.UUCP>
Date: 3 May 88 15:36:40 GMT
References: <4134@super.upenn.edu> <3200014@uiucdcsm> <1484@pt.cs.cmu.edu> <1029@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk> <17424@glacier.STANFORD.EDU> <5717@sigi.Colorado.EDU>
Sender: news@linus.UUCP
Reply-To: bwk@mbunix (Barry Kort)
Organization: International Teleport and Telepath, Beantown, Mass.
Lines: 31
Summary: How did I come to be the way I am?

I also went back to reread Professor Minsky's theory of Free Will in the
concluding chapters of _Society of Mind_.  I am impressed with the
succinctness with which Minksky captures the essential idea that
individual behavior is generated by a mix of causal elements (agency
motivated by awareness of the state-of-affairs vis-a-vis one's value system)
and chance (random selection among equal-valued alternatives).

The only other treatises on Free Will that I resonated with were the
ones by Raymond Smullyan ("Is God a Taoist" in _The Tao is Silent_ and
reprinted in Hofstadter and Dennet's _The Mind's I_) and the book by
Daniel Dennet (_Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting_).

My own contribution to this discussion is summarized in the only free
verse I ever composed in my otherwise prosaic career:


                             Free Will 

                                or

                         Self Determination



          I was what I was.

                     I am what I am.

                               I will be what I will be.


--Barry Kort