On Mon, Jul 30, 2012 at 11:08:29AM -0700, meekerdb wrote: > On 7/30/2012 4:01 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: > >Free-will is an informal term use in many informal setting. > >religious people defined it often by the ability to choose > >consciously between doing bad things or not, and people from the > >law can invoke it as a general precondition for making sense of > >the responsibility idea. In cognitive science we can at least > >approximate it in different ways, and basically, with > >computationalism it is the ability to make choice in absence of > >complete information, and knowledge of that incomplete feature. > > I'm not clear on why you emphasize incomplete information? What > would constitute complete information? and why how would that > obviate 'free will'. Is it coercive? >
With complete information, a totally rational being makes optimal choices, and has no free will, but always beats an irrational being. Conversely, with incomplete information, a rational being will make a wrong choice, or simply fail to make a choice at all, and so is usually beaten by an irrational being. This is where the idea that free will is the capability to act irrationally (or as I put it "do something stupid") comes from. There are definite evolutionary advantages to acting irrationally some of the time (though not all the time :). -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
