On 13 Aug 2012, at 00:32, Russell Standish wrote:
On Sun, Aug 12, 2012 at 04:24:22PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 12 Aug 2012, at 11:45, Russell Standish wrote:
On Sun, Aug 12, 2012 at 11:01:09AM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 11 Aug 2012, at 09:45, Russell Standish wrote:
Nevertheless, randomness is a key component of free will.
So comp is false? I mean comp can only defend a compatibilist (or
mechanist, deterministic) theory of free-will, like with the self-
indetermination based on diagonalization.
I have never seen how we can use randomness to justify free-will.
May be you can elaborate?
Bruno
If there are several actions an agent may perform, and one optimal
in
terms of the agent's utility, but the utility is computationally
unfeasible, then an agent can choose one of the actions by random
choice.
How?
Agents perform actions. That is the meaning of agency. If random
oracles are available to the agent, why shouldn't the agent use them.
OK. But the question is: would an agent lost free-will in case no
random oracle is available?
I don't see why this would entail comp is false though. Perhaps you
could elaborate?
Because comp implies that there is no randomness at the ontological
level.
Assuming that by "ontological level", you mean what I call the
"syntactic level" in my book.
Ontology and syntax are different notion. With comp they are close,
but not equivalent. Syntax concerns mainly finite symbols and finite
sequences of symbols, finite sequences of sequences of symbols.
Ontology concerns what we assume to exist independently of us. I am
not sure symbols can be said to exist, as symbol, independently of us.
but that might be a vocabulary detail.
There is no free will at the syntactic level, nor is there
consciousness, nor human beings, wet water or any other emergent
stuff.
Free will only makes sense at the semantic level. The level which
gives meaning to consious lives.
OK.
I guess you are alluding to the self-indeterminacy (à-la
Turing, not to be confused with the first person indeterminacy)
which can make a decision looking random for the one who does it,
I would have thought that first person indeterminancy would fit the
bill perfectly.
It can be used as a local random oracle, although in practice it is
simpler to use a quantum algorithm. I doubt people would agree to
duplicate themselves to make the right statistical choice. Actually,
they will use coin or pseudo-random algorithm.
Note that NO machine can ever distinguish a truly random sequence with
some sequence which can be generated by machine more complex than
themselves.
With comp, the following are absolutely undecidable:
- the cardinality of the universe is aleph_zero, or aleph_one, of
2^aleph_zero, etc.
- there is a random oracle at play in our experience (although we know
already that there is a random oracle at play in the *existence* and
*stability* of our experiences).
Note that as there can be no conscious observer of the 3rd
person deterministic subtsrate, it makes no sense to speak of free
will for the entities of that substrate.
OK.
but which is not the non-compatibilist kind of randomness that some
defender of free-will want to introduce.
I have never met anyone wanting to do this. They sound like some sort
of long-discredited Cartesian dualist. Are you sure they're not
strawmen
you have conjured up?
John Clark seems to believe that they still exist, as he argues all
the times against them, and then it seems to me that Craig Weinberg
has defended such notion, I think.
I don't think I have conjured up :)
There was a deterministic/free will paradox in the 19th century, when
Laplace's "clockwork universe" reigned supreme. But since the
development of quantum mechanics in the 1920, the paradox was
disolved.
With the wave-collapse, which makes no sense. With Everett we are back
to pure 3-person determinism, like with comp. And plasuibly the same
kind of indeterminacy. Again, I can see this playing a role in problem
solving, but not in free-will (as I defend the compatibilist notion of
free-will).
And as David Deutcsh is want to point out, for the price of
a Multiverse, one can have one's deterministic cake and freely eat it
too (sorry for mangling the metaphors :). But this works because the
free will exists at a different level from that where determinism
rules.
I am OK with this, but this means that free-will does not need 3-
randomness.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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