From: pdc@dcs.ed.ac.uk (Paul Crowley)
Newsgroups: alt.peeves,talk.religion.misc
Subject: Re: How do they do it?
Date: 15 Oct 92 13:23:37 GMT
Reply-To: pdc@dcs.ed.ac.uk (Paul Crowley)
Organization: Laboratory for the Foundations of Computer Science, Edinburgh U

In article <1992Oct14.142027.11640@sun0.urz.uni-heidelberg.de> gsmith@lauren.uucp (Gene W. Smith) writes:
>In article <Bw2F88.Mpo@dcs.ed.ac.uk> pdc@dcs.ed.ac.uk (Paul Crowley)
>writes:
>>But seriously believing in a benevolent, omnipotent, omniscient God? 
>>Or free will? Or purpose to the Universe? How do they do it?
>
>If they don't have free will, they don't have any choice, so the
>question makes no sense.  They *don't* "do it", because they don't do
>anything.
>
>If they do have free will, then they start wondering what it means and
>why to be a free moral agent, and what they ought to be doing.  This
>can lead to reading Kant, and from there, anything can happen.

So, we meet again.  Our last swordfight was curtailed by circumstances
beyond my control.  Now, I have returned to tackle my most formidable
of opponents.  <<raises foil>> En garde!

The Story So Far: Gene and Paul were engaged in a swordfight to the
death over the necessity of atheism as a scientific assumption.
However, as the fight was just getting to the good bit, a giant boot
with U. of Edinburgh swung across the scene and Paul was booted
offstage.  Now Read On...

Free will does seem to me a ludicrous concept.  The distinction you
are trying to make between events that occur because a choice has been
made and those which occur without choice is artificial.  Furthermore,
if we didn't use this artificiality, we wouldn't be able to reason
about people in a useful way.  I'll give a few examples that convince
me of this.

Supposing I'm arachnophobic.  I open a cupboard and inside is a very
large tarantula sitting next to the jar of peach chutney.  As fast as
my hand will move, I close the cupboard again.  Now, supposing I
really really want some peach chutney.  I'm aware that the sting from
a tarantula isn't very dangerous and they don't often sting anyway,
but despite this I *can't* open the cupboard door again.  I really
can't.  It seems to me that if my actions were genuinely chosen and
not the result of a mechanism, I would be able to.

Supposing I find something out and predict that my boyfriend is going
to be angry about it.  It seems to me that my ability to carry a
little model of him in my head that models those areas where he's most
predictable is a result of the fact that he's machine.  To steal an
example from Bertrand Russell, we can all predict when he's going to
tell a certain anecdote even when he thinks he's being totally
spontaneous.

Supposing a chess computer makes a move I consider strange.  I might
as the designers, "Why did it do that?", and they might say "It was
that or a pawn sacrifice on move 35, and it doesn't like pawn
sacrifices."  Most chess computer designers would hasten to add that
they were speaking metaphorically, but I beg to differ; the tastes of
a chess program are vastly easier to describe than those of a human,
boiling down to a few thousand lines of code, but they resemble tastes
in every other respect.  Indeed, we can posit a chess computer which
uses a neural net for static evaluation, in which case its tastes can
only be described either by enumerating the weights on all the
synapses (a very unsatisfactory explanation) or describing how it
seems to behave in practice.  If we met a program that could pass the
Turing Test, we would have a very hard time saying it didn't really
choose its responses even though we know that they were totally
determined given its state at the start of the test and the inputs.

I really can't imagine what you would expect a person with a soul
would be like.  Some things are easier to predict than others;
sometimes the weather is unpredictable, and sometimes my boyfriend is
predictable.  'Choice' is a property not of things in the real world
but of the way I think about them.

There's probably a better place to discuss this.  Anyone for
talk.religion.misc.not-fuckwits?
--
  __                                ____
\/ o\ Paul Crowley pdc@dcs.ed.ac.uk \  /
/\__/ "SET ME ON FIRE!" - Big Black  \/