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

[scerir]

> > I do not think that genes and environment
> > play a major role when people buy, or sell,
> > (or keep) shares of IBM, or Apple.

Stathis:
> No? What else could *possibly* be at play here?

According to W.Buffett our goal as investors should
simply be to purchase, at a rational price,
a part interest in an easily understandable business
whose earnings are virtually certain to be materially
higher 5, 10 and 20 years from now.

It is secret the strategy of the funds directed
by the well known mathematician J.Simons (Chern-Simons
theory).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance_Technologies_Corp
http://stochastix.wordpress.com/2006/12/23/dr-james-simons-selected-as-the-2
006-iafesungard-financial-engineer-of-the-year/

Imo in both cases above genes and environment only play
a little role. There is some room for 'free will' in finance.
Sometimes it is called intuition.

> The "free" choices in Bell inequality type experiments
> are really random choices. Is there a difference between
> free will and randomness?

In any description, information is sacrificed through
the coarse graining that yields decoherence between
histories and gives rise to probabilities for histories.
This coarse graining might be an important concept.
I do not know if the essential 'randomness'
(uncomputability) or the essential 'contextuality'
http://www.arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0604079
are really relevant, regarding the problem of
(human) 'free will'.

> My view of it is that the feeling that we are not
> constrained in making a choice is what we term "free will",
> and it doesn't feel any more or less free if the
> choice really is constrained or if it is random.

Maybe. Rafal (?) pointed out a difference between the
'first person' and the 'third person' description
of 'free will'.