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Article 6655 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: shanks@saifr00.cfsat.honeywell.com (Mark Shanks)
Subject: Re: Freewill, chaos and digital systems 
Message-ID: <1992Aug19.192127.13867@saifr00.cfsat.honeywell.com>
Organization: Honeywell Air Transport Systems Division
References: <Bt4xt1.MA0.1@cs.cmu.edu> <702@trwacs.fp.trw.com> <1992Aug19.144240.8058@syscon.rn.com> 
Date: Wed, 19 Aug 92 19:21:27 GMT
Lines: 27

In article <1992Aug19.144240.8058@syscon.rn.com> don@syscon.rn.com (Don McLane) writes:

>I was just thinking about this, so here's my speculation: I think the
>feeling of freewill may arise from our disconnectedness with the
>past.  The past doesn't seem to determine us; we feel like
>autonomous agents.  But, if the world is chaotic, our present
>mental state is the result of uncountable insignificant details.
>We can't trace the causal chain backwards, so we feel free.
>
>So, I say yes, the feeling (illusion?) of freewill arises solely
>through the mechanism of chaos.

Ah, a behaviorist. Would it follow that the degree of "disconnectedness"
experienced by an individual would have some bearing on the degree of
illusion of freewill? Would an existentialist be more disconnected than
Skinner? Would children have greater free will than adults because of
less (a smaller amount of) chaotic accretion?

Without getting into a behaviorist/free will discussion, I don't see any
reason to invoke chaos as an influence on the perception of free will, unless
it would be to discuss random neural firings or variances in stimulation
levels of assorted postsynaptic receptors. I'm sure that many readers here
would offer arguements on chaos implications for psychology, world history,
and economics, but in these instances, (IMHO), it's stretching.

Mark Shanks
shanks@saifr00.cfsat.honeywell.com


