Newsgroups: comp.ai,comp.robotics,comp.ai.philosophy
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!howland.reston.ans.net!news.sprintlink.net!redstone.interpath.net!hilbert.dnai.com!nic.scruz.net!earth.armory.com!rstevew
From: rstevew@armory.com (Richard Steven Walz)
Subject: Re: Minsky's new article
Organization: The Armory
Date: Sat, 3 Dec 1994 15:16:54 GMT
Message-ID: <D08qGA.HGw@armory.com>
References: <3agf03$qi5@mp.cs.niu.edu> <3aj3dv$8qt@mp.cs.niu.edu> <CzMC94.1Fr@armory.com> <3aqbmu$uk@mp.cs.niu.edu>
Sender: news@armory.com (Usenet News)
Nntp-Posting-Host: deepthought.armory.com
Lines: 111
Xref: glinda.oz.cs.cmu.edu comp.ai:25681 comp.robotics:15930 comp.ai.philosophy:23097

In article <3aqbmu$uk@mp.cs.niu.edu>, Neil Rickert <rickert@cs.niu.edu> wrote:
>In <CzMC94.1Fr@armory.com> rstevew@armory.com (Richard Steven Walz) writes:
>
>>The fact that in common parlance, "humans make choices", is useful jargon for
>>some purposes, does NOT indicate that those choices are not themselves, in
>>turn, caused, and therefore deterministic, no matter whether there is also
>>another mechanism in the human brain which will "believe" that it made the
>>choice out of thin air!!!
>
>You demonstrate my point -- we do not agree on the meaning of "free
>will".
>
>I most certainly have not claimed that choices are made out of thin
>air.  Making choices out of free air is not free will -- it would be
>irrationality.  We make choices based on our knowledge and our
>perceptions, and I do not claim that either of these exists in "thin
>air".
-----------------------------------------
And what I am saying is that you are making illogical assumptions when you
say that "WE" make choices! There is NO proof that WE make choices, just that
choices are made, and then that this thing called the "We" generator, just
another process function in the constellation of intellect, takes credit
FOR them, whether it can show HOW "it" derived them or not! Similar to the
way you never actually give your opinion so that you can avoid looking
stupid, (no offense, of course.) You never DO seem to tell anybody what
exactly you DO think, do you? You simply point out your objections to their
hypotheses. Not very convincing, if you have no analysis to replace theirs!
-Steve

>>                          I don't object so much to the word "will", as to
>>the idiotic assertion that this is "free" will, whatever the fuck THAT
>>might mean!!! Does it mean it costs nothing to assert? I suspect so!!!;->
>
>I don't understand why people get so worked up about the word "free"
>when it appears in "free will".  We talk about "free speech", but we
>still expect to be arrested if we yell HIJACK on an airplane, and we
>still expect a black eye if we yell insults to someone in their
>face.  In mathematics we talk about a "free variable", but we don't
>expect that the variable can jump of the equation, or even that it
>can make up its own mind as to what value to take.  Even when we talk
>about "free lunch" we expect that we have accepted an obligation
>along with that free lunch.  Why is it that "free", when used in
>"free will", is supposed to take on a self-contradictory meaning
>which it does not have in other uses of "free"?
----------------------------------------------
Well, for one thing, it's oxymoronic! If will is will, then will is free by
definition or it cannot be will! Since everything is caused and does NOT
pop out of thin air, I doubt that "will" in any non-fallacious sense really
exists, except to say that due to previous events occuring to this process,
it "wills" to do the logical or logically illogical thing and call it
original! That the thing that imagines that the whole phenomena of
existence is itself "it", that is to say "you", is another issue
altogether! From experiment, the existence of an aware whatever seems far
more the delusion of one device, the actions and processes of others,
simply all in communication and denying their separatenesses! Unity of the
entity is not even shown by you, and you're already saying silly things
like "we" or "I" "decide" to do this or that. Most non-rigorous!
-Steve

>>And as for quantum mechanics, or the idiotic assertion that science
>>couldn't be done without free will, consider a being that is determined by
>>circumstances to investigate and to do it in a methodical manner or in a
>>partially itrrational manner, or in a completely irrational manner.
>
>We disagree here also.  Science is always done in a methodical
>manner.  In the case of the methodical scientist, you understood the
>method.  In the case of the partially irrational scientist, you did
>not fully understand the method, so it seemed partially irrational to
>you.  In the case of the completely irrational scientist, you simply
>did not have the foggiest idea what he was doing, so it was more
>soothing to your mind to say that the scientist was irrational than
>to admit your own ignorance.
------------------------------------
What people, even the most stubborn and most ignorant try to do is to
predict and explain their world. That they do not follow good rules in
doing it simply means that their science has not progressed to a given
level. That's because that's all that science IS, the effort to predict and
explain the world. Science as a concept, "may" be done in what is NOW
considered a methodical manner, but even so, the method is not proven to
work! The deduction of whether someone is a witch was also methodical, but
not something we would call science today. There are countless imbeciles
walking about imagining that they made a logical decision in the last
election, for example. In fact they are a majority of voters! Thus we have
a nation of scientists who are quite distributed in their analytic
abilities and methodologies!;->   Science is not one thing!
-Steve

>>Whatever happens tomorrow, it was always going to happen tomorrow, and if
>>it doesn't, then it obviously WASN'T what was always going to happen
>>tomorrow!
>
>Self fulfilling prophecy.  Wait till tomorrow, see what happens, then
>declare that what happened was already fore-ordained the previous day.
-------------------------------------
It's clearly the only thing that WAS certainly pre-"ordained". And to say
that it was not begs the already true! If there was no certain tomorrow,
then, when we got there, anything could be happening willy-nilly, and
everything could happen at once, for no particular reason. Thus cause, by
whatever laws is proven. QED.
-Steve

>>          That is true, whether the world is a mechanistic Newtonian
>>device, a broken toy doing something weird, or whether "Gawd" plays dice
>
>Sure it is true.  It is a tautology.  It is a meaningless tautology,
>for it says nothing interesting about the nature of the world.
-------------------------------
Okay, smart guy! Say something interesting about the nature of the world
and causation and about this thread! I'll bet you CAN'T!!!;-)
-Steve Walz    rstevew@armory.com

