On 06 Feb 2012, at 19:39, John Clark wrote:
On Mon, Feb 6, 2012 at 7:12 AM, ronaldheld <ronaldh...@gmail.com>
wrote:
> An agent in possession of free will is able to perform an action
that was possible to predict by nobody but the agent itself.
There are a number of things wrong with this:
1) In theory there is no reason to think that the agent would be
better at predicting its own actions than a outsider, and indeed its
easy to imagine circumstances where the exact opposite is true.
2) In practice the subjective meaning of the word "free" would seem
to be incompatible with the ability to predict that you would do X
tomorrow for certain and nothing can change that fact, its certain,
it's just the way things are, you're on a path to X and there is no
way to get off, you're stuck. In other words "freedom" and "no
choice" don't fit. If you want a definition try the opposite:
"Free will is the INABILITY to always predict our own actions even
if a outsider can make such a prediction";
That's the only definition of free will that isn't gibberish or
circular but unfortunately nobody except me uses it.
I am glad that you are able to have a non gibberish definition of free-
will, after all.
It is not a long way from mine. I define a very general notion of free-
will as the ability to take decision in absence of complete
information. God can predict that I will go to the movie tonight, but
I cannot, so I feel free to go or not for it.
I think that the notions of determinism and indeterminism have nothing
to do with free-will, even if free-will introduces a notion of first
person self-indeterminacy (unrelated to the usual first person
indeterminacy based on self-duplication).
Bruno
3) If you can always predict your actions then you must be
deterministic and have had a reason for doing so, because otherwise
it was random and if you can predict randomness then its not random.
And if you did it for a reason it's deterministic. I mean, if you
weren't deterministic you couldn't determine what you would do next.
John K Clark
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