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From: jeff@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Subject: Re: Open Letter to Professor Penrose
Message-ID: <DL4rw4.7I6.0.macbeth@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>
Organization: Centre for Cognitive Science, Edinburgh, UK
References: <DKvsF0.MI2@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca> <1996Jan12.101306.111722@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu> <BILL.96Jan12141014@subiculum.nsma.arizona.edu>
Date: Sat, 13 Jan 1996 17:43:16 GMT
Lines: 23
Xref: glinda.oz.cs.cmu.edu sci.physics:164882 sci.physics.particle:7305 sci.math:132306 sci.math.symbolic:20657 sci.logic:16555 comp.ai:35884 comp.ai.philosophy:36577 sci.philosophy.meta:23062

In article <BILL.96Jan12141014@subiculum.nsma.arizona.edu> bill@nsma.arizona.edu (Bill Skaggs) writes:
>[...]         To say that I have free will is
>to say that I determine my own actions, that they are not determined
>by anything other than me, though of course they may be *influenced*
>by a variety of things.  If I am a physical system, and I determine my
>own actions, then my actions are physically determined, but I have
>free will nonetheless.  I don't see any contradiction between
>determinism and the existence of free will.

Fair enough, but what does it mean to say you determine your actions?
Some philosophers bring in something called "agent causation" here
which tends to seem rather mysterious, to say the least.  But if,
avoiding this, you say only that certain key processes take place
in you brain -- and so, in a sense, in you -- then it's not clear
that this makes free will compatible with determinism, because
those brain processes, and your decisions, were determined and
could not have turned out any other way.  (Or so the argument
goes.)

-- jd



