On 02 Apr 2012, at 18:03, meekerdb wrote:
On 4/2/2012 7:14 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote:
If all movement was involuntary in the
> > first place then there would be no significant difference
between
> > passively watching yourself move and passively watching
yourself not
> > move
>
> > If we had no free will, our belief about it should have no
effect on
> > the actual ability to execute our wishes though our motor
cortex.
>
> Non sequitur.
Why? If you program a machine to believe that it has free will, how
would such a belief have any effect on its behavior? How could it
improve its performance in any way?
If you program a machine to form explanatory and predictive models
of the world, then it will try to form a model of itself. But it
would be difficult and extremely wasteful, from a survival
standpoint, to provide it the introspective data necessary to model
its own physical internal decision processes. Failing to have this
introspection it may come to foolishly believe in something it calls
'free will'.
Why is it necessarily foolish? It might be foolish if the person
defend an inaccurate conception of free will, and it might be sane if
he defends a reasonable notion of free will.
We cannot predict ourselves, but we do have a notion of partial
responsibility. It would make no sense for a lawyer to claim that his
client , after committing some murder, was just obeying to the
physical laws. For in that case the member of the jury can judge him
guilty and responsible, and when ask why, just answer that they too
are just obeying the physical laws.
In fact the physical laws, or the low level computations are just not
relevant, and free will is the ability to make a choice with respect
to ignorance on a spectrum of possible actions. It is just a more
general notion of partial responsibility, so that we can decide if
someone deserve a medical treatment or to go to jail (to protect
society). Of course I am in favor of the compatibilist account of free
will, and I follow you on your reply to Craig. You can call it simply
"will", if you prefer. I think all animals have some amount of will.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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