[extropy-chat] Best To Regard Free Will as Existing

[Russell Wallace]

On 4/6/07, Stathis Papaioannou <stathisp at gmail.com> wrote:

> But how is this true in a deterministic world? Children and criminals are
> just collections of matter which follow the laws of physics (scene in court:
> "Your Honour, I submit that my client is just a collection of matter with no
> choice other than to obey the laws of physics, and I challenge the
> prosecution to prove otherwise!").
>

And what of it? From that perspective, juries are just collections of matter
with no choice other than to obey the laws of physics, and you can't call
them wrong for convicting the accused - you can't consistently even use
concepts like right and wrong. Once you switch to a higher level of
organization and allow there can be such a thing as wrongful conviction,
you're invoking morality, which implies free will, so you must allow that a
criminal can be held responsible for his actions. This is simple logic;
whether electrons are deterministic or not has nothing to do with it.
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