ellis@spar.UUCP (Michael Ellis) (04/09/85)
>If I do not have free will then I cannot ``make a mistake'' -- every thing >that I do is outside of the realm of personal choice and therefore is >inevitable. It may be inevitable that certain people speculate on >whether or not they have free will, of course, but the hard part is >explaining the great bulk of evidence that seems to indicate that it is >a good thing to learn since we can avoid making mistakes that way. > >Laura Creighton Laura, I cannot believe a person as otherwise well-read as you seem to be still believes that the world is deterministic, or that there is past/future symmetry that makes the future `unalterable' in the same sense as the past is. This comment is equally directed at Rich Rosen. At the risk of boring this newsgroup by repeating myself, please note that: THERE IS NOTHING DETERMINISTIC IN THIS UNIVERSE Check out any text in quantum mechanics. As for the broken-ness of past/future symmetry, have you read Ilya Prigogine's `Order out of Chaos'? None of this PROVES free-will, but it sure as hell creates the possibility of a universe in which free will is allowed to exist. Your insistence on imagining that everything is inevitable in spite the enormous weight of scientific evidence that would indicate otherwise strikes me as almost Sargentian self-torture. khronos ouketi estai -michael
geoff@boulder.UUCP (Geoffrey M. Clemm) (04/11/85)
In article <spar.171> ellis@spar.UUCP (Michael Ellis) writes: > Laura, I cannot believe a person as otherwise well-read as you > seem to be still believes that the world is deterministic ... > > This comment is equally directed at Rich Rosen. > note that: > THERE IS NOTHING DETERMINISTIC IN THIS UNIVERSE > Check out any text in quantum mechanics. > Your insistence on imagining that everything is inevitable in > spite the enormous weight of scientific evidence that would > indicate otherwise strikes me as almost Sargentian self-torture. Michael, everyone is aware of the existence of randomness. Unfortunately randomness is not useful for analyzing the concept of free will that interests many of us (i.e. where it is the determiner of responsibility/blame). If someone was discussing the difficulty getting to Finland, your response is analagous to saying "but you're forgetting that you could just rent a car !!". We're all aware that you can rent a car, but unfortunately, the problem being discussed centered around how to cross the Atlantic, for which the possession of a car is irrelevant. > At the risk of boring this newsgroup by repeating myself ... Yes.
laura@utzoo.UUCP (Laura Creighton) (04/12/85)
Michael Ellis, I think you misunderstood me. I agree with you. I agree with you for more or less precisely the reasons that you gave. I was trying to point out the difficulties involved in believing in an entirely mechanistic and deterministic fatalism -- which I what I still think Rosen believes in. Alas -- you understand me and take me seriously, and Rosen still doesn't understand. I give up. If you can explain this to Rich Rosen, please do -- I can't figure out what I am doing wrong. Laura Creighton utzoo!laura
rlr@pyuxd.UUCP (Dr. Emmanuel Wu) (04/18/85)
> Michael Ellis, > I think you misunderstood me. I agree with you. I agree with you for > more or less precisely the reasons that you gave. I was trying to > point out the difficulties involved in believing in an entirely > mechanistic and deterministic fatalism -- which I what I still think > Rosen believes in. Alas -- you understand me and take me seriously, > and Rosen still doesn't understand. I give up. If you can explain this > to Rich Rosen, please do -- I can't figure out what I am doing wrong. [LAURA] What you are doing wrong is that the "difficulties" you describe above that you attribute to what you call "deterministic fatalism" (something I certainly wouldn't call it---it implies a "determiner", which I see no reason to believe in), that these difficulties are nothing more than your own wishful thinking---you don't LIKE the consequences of such a universe, thus you ASSUME that another model holds that describes it "better" because you like it better. You have up until now failed to delineate any actual "difficulties" with such a perspective of the universe. *You* give up? (And to think some people claim that *I* have some sort of attitude problem?) (I know my attitude problem with respect to certain people: I don't agree with them, and if I should, Ubizmo forbid, show some errors in their models or their beliefs, I am "attacking" them. I'll have to correct this attitude problem as soon as possible...) -- "When you believe in things that you don't understand, you'll suffer. Superstition ain't the way." - Stevie Wonder ("Superstition") Rich Rosen ihnp4!pyuxd!rlr