Le 21-juil.-12, à 17:29, John Clark a écrit :
On Sat, Jul 21, 2012 Bruno Marchal <[email protected]> wrote:
>> so we end up making no choice at all or we make a choice based on
nothing, in other words at random.
> I don't believe we can make choice at random.
Fine, I don't think that's true but as far as this discussion goes it
wouldn't matter if it was. If the choice was not random then it
happened for a reason and was deterministic; and the "free will" noise
is just as meaningless as it would be if choices were random.
Not for a compatibilist.
The fact that consciousness and free will can be justified or
explained, in some way, in a deterministic framework, does not make
those concepts referring to something unreal.
And yet very often people have great difficulty explaining, even to
themselves, why they made the choice they did; so either there was no
reason for the choice or there was but the conscious mind does not
know what it was,
That is it.
those are the only two possibilities and neither elevates the "free
will" noise even one Planck Length above pure gibberish.
It does not elevate the "incompatibilist" notion of free will above
gibberish, but this we already agreed on. It just define free will for
the compatibilist, and I don't see why you believe that this is
gibberish (as opposed to incompatibilist free will).
> It is close. It has been defended by Popper, I.J. Good and some
others, and it suits well mechanism.
This needs to be defended?? I admit that tautologies have the virtue
of being true but I would have thought it would be embarrassing for
two grown men, let alone two famous philosophers, to think that this
childish observation deserves the millions of words they have churned
out about it which all boils down to "we don't know what we don't
know".
The notion of "Knowledge" is the most difficult notion to define with
some rigor, as Socrates, in the writing of Plato, makes clear when
refuting or criticizing all attempts of definition of it given by
Theaetetus. Then you are too quick to sum up the definition of free
will by "we don't know what we don't know", for, as you admit yourself,
the absence of knowledge, in this setting, is a consequence of
Turing-like form of indeterminacy, which is not tautological, and that
was my point that I share with Popper and Good.
In the human sciences, a lot of notions seems "trivial", but are not.
We just happen to have a very old biological brain which makes it
appear trivial, but as AI researcher know well, this is not the case.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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