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From: sean@aipna.ed.ac.uk (Sean Matthews)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: what is this thing called `free will'
Message-ID: <38@aipna.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 18 May 88 03:03:28 GMT
Reply-To: sean@uk.ac.ed.aipna.UUCP (Sean Matthews)
Organization: Dept. of AI, Edinburgh, UK
Lines: 45

Arguments for `free will' from itrospection boil down to
`I think I have free will because I think I have free will'
which is not even worthy of the label `tautology'.

The (contradictory?) arguements go:
I  experience what I believe to be `free will' all the time
since I have yet to experience myself doing something In spite of
my desiring to do the opposite, even though I am not subject to any
coercion.[1]

I have demonstrated `free will' since I wanted to drink Coca Cola,
but instead drank Pepsi Cola (That I also wanted to prove I had free
will is overlooked).

People often seem to confuse an impulse to perversity for `free will'.

There are two problems:

1. does anyone have the slightest idea of what `free will' looks like.

2. perfect introspection is a logical impossibility[2], so anyone who
   invokes it allows their `mind' the sort of logical transcendance that
   Thomas Aquinas explicitly denied his god.  This seems to be
   arrogating rather a lot.

Se\'an Matthews                   
Dept. of Artificial Intelligence JANET:sean%sin@uk.ac.ed.aiva
University of Edinburgh          ARPA: sean%uk.ac.ed.aiva@nss.cs.ucl.ac.uk
80 South Bridge                  UUCP: ...!mcvax!ukc!aiva!sean
Edinburgh, EH1 1HN, Scotland     

[1] I don't know enough about psychiatric medicine to say whether it
would be possible for a schitzophrenic to have an experence
superficially akin to this---two aware `minds' in one brain, only one
of which is exercising control---but the possibility raises
interesting questions which can be, and are, dealt with in other places.

[2] if a `mind' x had perfect introspection, it would need to contain
within itself a complete model of itself, as well as the structures
which are used to model x and to reason about it, but these would need
to be inside x and therefore would be in the model.  This is just a
version of the barber paradox.

PS. This has all probably been said before, but I didn't read it; if
it has, I apologise for wasting your time.