Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!helios.ee.lbl.gov!pasteur!ucbvax!decwrl!sun!quintus!ok
From: ok@quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: DVM's request for definitions
Keywords: philosophy, free will
Message-ID: <1020@cresswell.quintus.UUCP>
Date: 25 May 88 22:51:49 GMT
References: <29049@yale-celray.yale.UUCP> <894@maize.engin.umich.edu>
Organization: Quintus Computer Systems, Mountain View, CA
Lines: 39

In article <894@maize.engin.umich.edu>, brian@caen.engin.umich.edu (Brian Holtz) writes:
> 3. volition: the ability to identify significant sets of options and to 
> predict one's future choices among them, in the absence of any evidence 
> that any other agent is able to predict those choices.
> 
> There are a lot of implications to replacing free will with my notion of 
> volition, but I will just mention three.
> 
> - If my operationalization is a truly transparent one, then it is easy 
> to see that volition (and now-dethroned free will) is incompatible with 
> an omniscient god.  Also, anyone who could not predict his behavior as 
> well as someone else could predict it would no longer be considered to 
> have volition.

Why does the other predictor have to be an AGENT?

"easy to see that ...?"  Nope.  You have to show that volition is
imcompatible with perfect PAST knowledge first...

"no longer considered to have volition ..."  I've just been reading a
book called "Predictable Pairing" (sorry, I've forgotten the author's)
name, and if he's right it seems to me that a great many people do
not have volition in this sense.  If we met Hoyle's "Black Cloud", and
it with its enormous computational capacity were to predict our actions
better than we did, would that mean that we didn't have volition any
longer, or that we had never had it?

What has free will to do with prediction?  Presumably a dog is not
self conscious or engaged in predicting its activities, but does that
mean that a dog cannot have free will?  

One thing I thought AI people were taught was "beware of the homunculus".
As soon as we start identifying parts of our mental activity as external
to "ourselves" we're getting into homunculus territory.

For me, "to have free will" means something like "to act in accord with
my own nature".  If I'm a garrulous twit, people will be able to predict
pretty confidently that I'll act like a garrulous twit (even though I
may not realise this), but since I will then be behaving as I wish I
will correctly claim free will.