[ExI] Free Will

[Will Steinberg]

What are you arguing?  I don't think its arguable that we don't have the *
appearance* of free will; we can definitely be surprised by our choices
because of inability to comprehend fully what is going on, but the actual
decisions are determined by physical law, no?

On Sat, Dec 27, 2008 at 9:23 PM, Damien Broderick <thespike at satx.rr.com>wrote:

> At 08:09 PM 12/27/2008 -0500, Will Steinberg wrote:
>
>  Do any of y'all believe in free will?
>>
>
> To repeat my post from last year:
>
> ...Surely what we mean by "free to choose"
> does not mean *canned but distinctive*, although that's part of our
> sense of individuality. And quite obviously it doesn't mean "random".
> It seems to me to follow from our capacity to compute or model a
> sheaf of possible consequences (accurately or not is beside the
> point) of alternative actions we might take soon or even in the long
> run. We constantly acquire new and slightly or even drastically
> surprising information, compress it, use it to modify our working
> models or hold it ready to do so if the data seems relevant to some
> emergent situation. So we can be *surprised* by choices, and by our
> assessments, and by our meta-assessments of how we're likely to feel
> if we act in one of several open ways, and all of this combines the
> overabundance of new information from a world larger than our mental
> workspace and memory, and the unexpected outcome of computations
> conducted by modules the inner working of which escape our conscious
> scrutiny.
>
> Damien Broderick
>
>
>
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