Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!oddjob!ncar!ames!ll-xn!mit-eddie!bloom-beacon!gatech!uflorida!novavax!proxftl!bill
From: bill@proxftl.UUCP (T. William Wells)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Free Will-Randomness and Question-Structure
Summary: some random comments
Message-ID: <194@proxftl.UUCP>
Date: 19 May 88 17:34:04 GMT
References: <22533@teknowledge-vaxc.ARPA>
Distribution: comp.ai
Organization: Proximity Technology, Ft. Lauderdale
Lines: 71

In article <22533@teknowledge-vaxc.ARPA>, wlieberm@teknowledge-vaxc.ARPA (William Lieberman) writes:
> Re: Free Will and Determinism.
>
>
> This most interesting kind of discussion reminds me of the old question,
>
>    " What happens when the irresistable cannonball hits the irremovable post? "
>
> The answer lies in the question, not in other parts of the outside world.
>
> If you remember your Immanual Kant and his distinction between analytic and
> synthetic statements, the cannonball question would be an analytic statement,
> of the form, " The red barn is red." - A totally useless statement, because
> nothing new about the outside world is implied in the statement. Similarly,
> I would say the cannonball question, since it is internally contradictory,
> wastes the questioner's time if he tries to hook it to the outside world.

This really made me laugh.  Not because of what I think is wrong
with it, but because of two things: One is that many people have
come down hard on Ayn Rand because she so routinely attacked
Kant, when, in their opinion, that was beating a dead horse; but
here he is, alive again.  The other is the spectacle of someone
arriving at the same conclusion I would have by a means that
contradicts the way I reached my own conclusion.

Foolishness aside, I would abandon the question, not because it
contains an internal inconsistency in presuming that the
described situation can exist, but because the presumed
interacting entities are wholly imaginary constructs.  Statements
about imaginary constructs (please, differentiate these from
possibly existing ones) have NO truth value, since, said truth
value implies some kind of relationship between the statement's
constituents and reality.  (N.B.  The mathematician's "true" is
not the same thing as the epistemologist's "true".)

> A concept like 'random' similarly may be thought of in terms simply of
> worldly unpredictability TO THE QUESTIONER.  If he comes from a society where
> they get differing results every time they add two oranges to two oranges,
> TO THEM addition of real numbers is random. (Also wouldn't an example of
> a non-recurring expansion of decimals, but certainly not random, be any
> irrational number, such as pi?)

Be careful: while, because of your next paragraph, you obviously
know of the difference between unpredictability and randomness,
you should avoid using the word `random' where you mean
`unpredictable'.  Doing so seems to cause confusion (and other
random, I mean unpredictable, behaviors) on the part of those who
do not understand the difference.  And, your first example is
another `immovable object': It cannot be real, so you cannot
reason with it.

> To me, the concept of randomness has to do with the subject's ability to
> descibe events forthcoming, not with the forthcoming events themselves.
> That is, randomness only exists as long as there are beings around who
> perceive their imprecise or limited predictions as incomplete. The events
> don't care, and occur regardless. It's important to not forget that the
> subjects themselves (us, e.g.) are part of the world, too.

Um, I would put more precisely as: randomness is a concept, not a
characteristic of an existent.  This concept is used to describe
a system which has known limits of action but whose determinants
are not wholly known.

> My main point here is that very often, questions that seem impossible to
> resolve often need to have the structure of the question looked at, rather
> than the rest of the outside world for empirical data to support or refute
> the question.
>
> Bill Lieberman

Agreed.