[ExI] Public draft of my book 'Tales of the Turing Church

[Stathis Papaioannou]

On Sat, 20 Oct 2018 at 08:50, Stuart LaForge <avant at sollegro.com> wrote:

John Clark wrote:
>
> > But the fact is you chose to do X
> > rather than Y because you prefer X. Why do you prefer X ? There are only
> > 2 possibilities,  there was a reason for you preferring it in which case
> > you are in the realm of cause and effect, or there was no cause for your
> > preference in which case it was random. So it's always a cuckoo clock or
> > a roulette wheel.
>
> A choice is a decision and decisions are not mystical phenomenon. A
> thermostat makes decisions, computers make decisions, and bacteria make
> decisions. Choice is a real physical phenomenon.
>
> I think you are conflating reason with cause. I can choose to save my
> money to buy a car in the future. Such a choice has no cause because
> classic causation presumably follows the arrow of time. Causes are in the
> past and effects are in the future. Therefore my preference to save my
> money has no past cause but it certainly has a reason and is certainly not
> random or irrational. You could make a case for reverse causation, but I
> have trouble envisioning a retrocausal cuckoo clock.
>

Your preferences are psychological states, physically encoded in your
brain, which form as a result of previous brain configuration and previous
experience. Your preferences therefore have a cause in the past and are the
cause of future events. An uncaused choice would be one that happens for no
reason at all, not even a bad reason. This might be OK if it happens
occasionally but if all your choices were like this you would not survive
long.

>>  Furthermore Conway published theorems regarding free will which
> >> defined it as the ability to make choices that are not a function of >>
> the past.
>
> > That's an event without a cause, and that's the definition of random.
>
> Humans can make decisions based upon preferences for future states that do
> not yet exist. Those decisions are events that are neither random nor
> caused by most accepted notions of causation.
>

The future state does not exist and may in fact never exist, but idea of
the future state exists encoded in your brain, and it is this which is a
contributory cause to forward-planning behaviour.


> > The only definition of free will that I know of that isn't gibberish is
> > the inability to always know for sure what you're going to do next until
> > you actually do it, and I find that no more mysterious and profound than
> > the fact that you don't know what the results of a calculation will be
> > until you've finished the calculation.
>
> I agree that there is nothing profound or mysterious about the ability to
> make decisions.
>
> >
> >>  Whether Conway's definition of free will is correct or not is
> >> debatable, but I can deliberately choose to say a non-sequitur or do
> >> something unpredicatbly spontaneous.
> >
> > I agree, there is no law of logic that demands every event have a cause,
> > randomness is possible. And there is another name for doing things for no
> > reason, irrational.
>
> Not all reasons for doing things are causes since some reasons for doing
> things are the effects of whatever it is that your are doing. And doing
> something to bring about a desired effect is neither random or irrational.
>

The effect does not contribute to its own cause. The expected effect is
like a simulation in the brain. If you think that you will go to paradise
if you crash a plane into a building, it is not going to paradise that
makes you crash the plane.

-- 
Stathis Papaioannou
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