Re:Is Free Will An Illusion?
by danielmims on Thursday September 03, 2009 @03:29PM
(#803298)
Unpredictability (or randomness) does not preserve the possibility of free will. One must have control over the process. That's really the basis of why we care about free will in the first place -- control.
Re:Is Free Will An Illusion?
by randallsquared on Thursday September 03, 2009 @04:07PM
(#803403)
I'm not talking about randomness (in fact, I specifically excluded that). Anyway, it's not really meaningful to speak of a process having control over itself -- it is itself.
Free will either is defined in such a way that mind must transcend physics to have it, or it's defined in a way that is meaningful inside the laws of physics. I have nothing to say about the first definition, but given that most here would agree that minds are constrained by physics, any remaining question about free will must refer to whether we can predict the actions of an agent, and since it's obvious that we can if we have a sufficiently detailed simulation of the agent, the only definition in which "free will" is still a useful concept that meshes with our intuitive understanding of self-determination is the one I mention in my earlier comment.
Is water really wet, or is water really made of non-wet atoms of hydrogen and oxygen over which an illusory wetness is laid?
It's self-defeating to define free will in a way that inherently violates physics, but it's easy to define it in a way that doesn't, but still preserves what we mean intuitively by "free will": If it's possible to perfectly predict (absent actual errors in either mechanism) what a system will do without simulating it, the system doesn't have free will. If it's not possible without simulating the system (and the actions of the system aren't actually random), then it could be said to have free will.
This still leaves the possibility that it will turn out that humans don't have free will, of course, or only have it in certain conditions.