Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!lll-tis!ames!think!bloom-beacon!gatech!uflorida!novavax!proxftl!bill
From: bill@proxftl.UUCP (T. William Wells)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Free will does not require nondeterminism.
Keywords: free will, determinism, cause
Message-ID: <185@proxftl.UUCP>
Date: 17 May 88 22:37:52 GMT
Organization: Proximity Technology, Ft. Lauderdale
Lines: 39

One common misconception I have seen on the subject of free will
is that free will requires nondeterminism.

It does not.

I do not intend to be rigorous in this posting, that would be
better done in talk.philosophy.misc or sci.philosophy.tech.  My
purpose in bringing this up is to open the discussion to the idea
of free will in a deterministic entity.  If you do want me to
defend what I say, do not ask for it in this newsgroup.  Instead,
send me e-mail and if I get enough requests and have enough time
(next year, maybe), I will deal with this in one of those
groups.

(I am being deliberately vague here, so that what I say can be
interpreted by those with varying philosophical ideas.)

A sufficient cause is a phenomena which requires that some
other phenomena exist.

We can say that if external (to the thing) phenomena are
sufficient cause for the state of a thing and for its action in a
given state then external phenomena are a sufficient cause of a
things action.

The absolute minimum required for free will is that there exists
at least one action a thing can perform for which there is no
external phenomena which are a sufficient cause.

For if this is the case, then it is invalid to say that
everything that the thing does is caused by external phenomena.
Therefore, the thing itself must be considered as the cause of
what it does (unless you admit the existence of uncaused
action).

This does not require that the thing could have done other than
what it did, though it does not prohibit this, either.  Thus free
will (a specific kind of action supposed to be not determined by
external phenomena) could exist even in a deterministic
universe.