On Tue, Jun 5, 2012 on Bruno Marchal <[email protected]> wrote: > >> There are only two things I mean by "free will" because they are the > only two that are not gibberish, but nobody around here except me likes > either definition: > 1) Free Will is the inability to always know what you are going to do > before you do it. > > > > That would be too large. Pebbles does not know what they will do, for > example. >
Yes, so pebbles have free will. I didn't say my definition of free will was useful, I only said it was not gibberish. > Free will is more in the knowledge of that inability, > But many people lack that knowledge including everyone on this list except me, it is a fact that they can be absolutely positively 100% certain they will do X at future time Y but when the time comes they find themselves doing something not even close to X. In fact such a thing is not even rare. > including its exploitation to accelerate the decision in absence of > complete information. > Computers can make guesses based on the most probable outcome too, and if fitted with a simple hardware random number generator can make guesses based on nothing at all; as I've said computers used that fact to tell people how to build a H-bomb with the Monty Carlo algorithm. > > 2) Free Will is a noise made by the mouth by a certain subset of bipedal > creatures. > > I don't think so. Here you confuse the concept of free will with the noise > made by mouth when talking on that concept in english. > But that's exactly the problem, there is no concept of free will, there is only the noise "free will", a noise like a duck's "quack" that stands for nothing. > there are many situation when a computer can predict its doing Yes, but in general they can not. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
