🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <2586@rice-chex.ai.mit.edu> miken@wheaties.ai.mit.edu (Michael N. Nitabach) writes:
>This is the classical definition of free will
>which antonymically opposes the concepts of free will and determinism.  That
>is, acts performed with "free will", are just those acts which are not
>determined--i.e. those acts that "could have been otherwise."

Nice one. In fact, in everyday living we normally suppose that those
whose actions are bizarrely unpredictable are nutcases who have no free
will, their actions being determined by the unfathomable pathology of
their illness, whereas those whose actions are most predictable are
those Good, Sane, and Rational people who ALWAYS choose to do the Right
Thing by their well-known publicly-declared value system. In fact, the
reason why I sometimes fail to exercise my free choice to do the Right
and Proper thing is that I sometimes lose control of myself, and am
overcome by the determinism of some animal greed...

>It seems to me that the crucial
>issue is not whether or not a particular action is physically determined or
>not, but rather whether or not the agent can be said to have "controlled"
>the action, i.e. whether the cause of the action arose from the beliefs
>and desires of the actor, or from unavoidable environmental constraints.

But here you are impaled on the dualist's dilemma: IF the mind is a
function of the brain (mind-states correspond to brain-states), then
since the brain, as a machine, is causally determined (brain-state n+1
can be deduced from brain-state n plus sense-data), it follows that
mind-states are causally determined by physical events, and are just
another (perhaps more convenient) way of describing them. The only
(obvious) way to restore the causal primacy and efficacy of mental
events (beliefs, intentions, etc.) is to disconnect mind-states from
brain-states, creating the mental/physical dualism. That solves the
causal primacy of will, but at the price of raising the new problem of
how on earth the non-physical mind affects the brain.

But your suggestion is on the right lines: we get into this puzzling
position by fleeing thoughtlessly from the idea that free-will and
predictability are contradictory, when even a little reflection shows
that to be incompatible with our commonplace speech. The hard question
is what exactly do we mean by "could have been otherwise"?
-- 
Chris Malcolm    cam@uk.ac.ed.edai   031 667 1011 x2550
Department of Artificial Intelligence, Edinburgh University
5 Forrest Hill, Edinburgh, EH1 2QL, UK