From: gsmith@lauren.uucp (Gene W. Smith)
Subject: Re: How do they do it?
Followup-To: talk.religion.misc 
Organization: IWR, University of Heidelberg, Germany
Date: Fri, 16 Oct 92 17:14:26 GMT

In article <Bw5zvE.62I@dcs.ed.ac.uk> pdc@dcs.ed.ac.uk (Paul Crowley) writes:

>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.

Curious.  This sort of thought experiment seems to me to cut the other
way.  That is, whether or not one is really a free agent, it is hard not
to feel oneself to be.  If you have no real choice, then it seems to me
that it ought to be possible to let go of the illusion of chosing and
having to decide, and just let events take their course.  But in fact,
we can't do this.  The event you mention is a psychological compulsion,
and is interesting precisely because it is out of the realm of ordinary
behavior.  But that means it is not a good example of what ordinary behavior
is like.

>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. 

For any range of behavior, it is always possible to define an automaton
which will produce that behavior.  But this tells us nothing about what
is actually producing the behavior.

>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.

This is a strange analogy, despite how common it has become.  If the
chess computer is really aware, it is clear that its awareness can have
no function, since the output of the program is determined by an
algorithm which makes no reference to possible conscious states of the
chess computer.  Hence, any consciousness it has must be an
epiphenomenon, and if humans are analogous, out own consciousness is
also an epiphenomenon. In which case, why is it there, and why do we
have the illusion that it is involved in the decision-making process?

-- 
     Gene Ward Smith/Brahms Gang/IWR/Ruprecht-Karls University 
               gsmith@kalliope.iwr.uni-heidelberg.de
Newsgroups: alt.peeves