Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcvax!ukc!etive!aipna!edai!cam From: cam@edai.ed.ac.uk (Chris Malcolm cam@uk.ac.ed.edai 031 667 1011 x2550) Newsgroups: comp.ai Subject: Re: Free will and responsibility. Keywords: Behaviorism, materialism, dogma, science Message-ID: <386@edai.ed.ac.uk> Date: 25 May 89 20:12:49 GMT References: <10333@ihlpb.ATT.COM> <3850@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu> <52019@linus.UUCP> <533@orawest.UUCP> <2586@rice-chex.ai.mit.edu> Reply-To: cam@edai (Chris Malcolm) Organization: University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh Lines: 43 In article <2586@rice-chex.ai.mit.edu> miken@wheaties.ai.mit.edu (Michael N. Nitabach) writes: >This is the classical definition of free will >which antonymically opposes the concepts of free will and determinism. That >is, acts performed with "free will", are just those acts which are not >determined--i.e. those acts that "could have been otherwise." Nice one. In fact, in everyday living we normally suppose that those whose actions are bizarrely unpredictable are nutcases who have no free will, their actions being determined by the unfathomable pathology of their illness, whereas those whose actions are most predictable are those Good, Sane, and Rational people who ALWAYS choose to do the Right Thing by their well-known publicly-declared value system. In fact, the reason why I sometimes fail to exercise my free choice to do the Right and Proper thing is that I sometimes lose control of myself, and am overcome by the determinism of some animal greed... >It seems to me that the crucial >issue is not whether or not a particular action is physically determined or >not, but rather whether or not the agent can be said to have "controlled" >the action, i.e. whether the cause of the action arose from the beliefs >and desires of the actor, or from unavoidable environmental constraints. But here you are impaled on the dualist's dilemma: IF the mind is a function of the brain (mind-states correspond to brain-states), then since the brain, as a machine, is causally determined (brain-state n+1 can be deduced from brain-state n plus sense-data), it follows that mind-states are causally determined by physical events, and are just another (perhaps more convenient) way of describing them. The only (obvious) way to restore the causal primacy and efficacy of mental events (beliefs, intentions, etc.) is to disconnect mind-states from brain-states, creating the mental/physical dualism. That solves the causal primacy of will, but at the price of raising the new problem of how on earth the non-physical mind affects the brain. But your suggestion is on the right lines: we get into this puzzling position by fleeing thoughtlessly from the idea that free-will and predictability are contradictory, when even a little reflection shows that to be incompatible with our commonplace speech. The hard question is what exactly do we mean by "could have been otherwise"? -- Chris Malcolm cam@uk.ac.ed.edai 031 667 1011 x2550 Department of Artificial Intelligence, Edinburgh University 5 Forrest Hill, Edinburgh, EH1 2QL, UK