From: mikeh@kralizec.zeta.org.au (Michael Hore)
Newsgroups: alt.atheism
Subject: Re: contradictory nature of free will and omni-anything
Date: 21 Jan 1993 09:26:24 +1100
Organization: Kralizec Dialup Unix Sydney: +61-2-837-1183 V.42bis
NNTP-Posting-Host: kralizec.zeta.org.au


Sangyong Jeon writes:

>Have you been following the discussion me and Ingles were having?

Yes, and with interest too.  Trouble is net news takes a couple of
days to wander down here to Australia, so by the time I write a response
and it wanders back up again, several other people have already said the
same thing.  So sorry if I always seem to be a bit late.  By now
no doubt you're read my posting on direction of information flow,
and replied, but I haven't seen your reply yet.  Anyway I'll try
to look ahead in time and anticipate it [ :-) ], as well as replying
to your posting here, which seems to raise some new points, although
maybe you said them before and I wasn't paying enough attention.

>The real difference between you and me is that I regard all activities
>mental and physical as physical phenomena. In other words, no soul
>independent of our body. You as a theist must acknowledge soul, I
>suppose.

Yes, but I'm not sure I want to say that all mental activities aren't
physical as well.  This is a very big question, but I'm inclined to say
that if you ask physical questions you'll get physical answers, and
they'll make sense.  My only reservation might be about self-consciousness.
I'd take soul and self-consciousness as being the same thing, and say
that its existence is self-evident to all of us, and so becomes an axiom
rather than something provable from anywhere else.  If somebody asks,
"But what measurable change does this 'self-consciousness' have on the
universe?", I'd say, simply the fact that many people (not just me)
discuss it and think it's important.  Would a super-clever AI machine
start of its own volition to reflect on its own self-consciousness?
I doubt it.  But maybe it would. This is only speculation now, so
enough said.

> The picture on 4-D manifold in my mind includes all
>activities, mental and physical. In that sense the feeling of having
>free will or choice is an illusion the occurrence of which is again a
>fixed event. This difference is fundamental. You as a theist, and I as
>an atheist, can never resolve it. And I have a nagging suspicion that
>many atheists also implicitly assumes (knowingly or not) that mind is
>independent of body. I don't.

As I said, I think if you ask physical questions, you'll get physical
answers.  So even from your point of view, it should be possible to
argue for free will.  Now this is just off the top of my head, but I
can think of a line of argument:

1.  The universe is not deterministic.  Quantum mechanics deals only
in probabilities.  As well as this, wherever chaos occurs, the future
very rapidly becomes uncomputable.  The overall result is even if
some vast computer could know the position and velocity of every
particle at some time t, (which it couldn't with certainty anyway),
it couldn't compute the configuration for 1 second later -- and in
any case, the configuration would include its own computation, so
I think it would be in principle uncomputable.  Certainly in practice.

Thus the picture on your 4-D manifold isn't determined by anything
other than its actually occurring.  My information flow argument
could be applied here as well.  So your decisions aren't determined
by anything other than your deciding them.  This sounds like free
will to me [if it walks like a duck...  :-)  ]

2. We experience free will.  It seems to us that we have it.  In the
absence of any compelling argument to the contrary, shouldn't we apply
Occam's Razor and say that free will is real?

Cheers,   Mike.

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Mike Hore          mikeh@kralizec.zeta.org.au
.sig deliberately kept short to minimize .sig/noise ratio.
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