Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!ncar!boulder!sunybcs!bingvaxu!vu0112
From: vu0112@bingvaxu.cc.binghamton.edu (Cliff Joslyn)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Free will does not require nondeterminism.
Keywords: free will, determinism, cause
Message-ID: <1212@bingvaxu.cc.binghamton.edu>
Date: 18 May 88 04:23:08 GMT
References: <185@proxftl.UUCP>
Reply-To: vu0112@bingvaxu.cc.binghamton.edu (Cliff Joslyn)
Organization: SUNY Binghamton, NY
Lines: 24

In article <185@proxftl.UUCP> bill@proxftl.UUCP (T. William Wells) writes:
>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.

I hope you do choose to carry on with this here. . .

Your view seems compelling, but also requires a crisp distinction
between the inside and the outside of the entity in question.  Although
it is frequently sufficient to abstract such a boundary, in theory and
in the limit of practice, this is not in fact possible.  Actually, this
issue is where traditional arguments of free will end up in circularity:
we must say that reflexes, dreams, delusions, compulsions, etc., are all
*OUTSIDE* of "me".  As the earlier lively conversation on whether
thoughts can be controlled shows, we can carry this distinction-making
on, narrowing the scope of the "willing agent" in the mind to a
singularity (my Will), about which we cannot gather evidence about
causal processes, nor make meaningful theories as to necessary and/or
sufficient conditions.

-- 
O---------------------------------------------------------------------->
| Cliff Joslyn, Cybernetician at Large
| Systems Science, SUNY Binghamton, vu0112@bingvaxu.cc.binghamton.edu
V All the world is biscuit shaped. . .