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From: jqb@netcom.com (Jim Balter)
Subject: Re: The only acceptable def. of Free Will
Message-ID: <jqbDM4Av4.2yC@netcom.com>
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References: <4er5uf$9lm@news-rocq.inria.fr>
Date: Thu, 1 Feb 1996 22:09:03 GMT
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In article <4er5uf$9lm@news-rocq.inria.fr>,
Mikal Ziane (Univ. Paris 5 and INRIA)  <ziane@noemie.inria.fr> wrote:
>(weak) Free Will is the ability to take decisions in agreement with your
>"core personality".
>
[...]
>"Fine, but what is this defintion useful to ?"
>Well, it helps define moral responsibility, which is what is often expected from
>a def. of free will. When someone lacks free will then this person is not morally responsible.
>"Why not?"
>Simply because it is useless to punish this person.
>"Why useless ?"
>Because the threat of punishement (i.e. threat of  something expected to go against
>the core desires of the person) cannot be taken into account by the person
>in her/his decision process. Of course this does not mean that the person should
>let be free not to behave again, but simply that inflicting pain will be useless.

This seems terribly circular.  If punishment induces changes in behavior, it
is useful, even if those changes aren't freely made.  You can hardly argue
from the usefulness of punishment to the presence of free will.

Consider a program designed to complete a task in a minimal amount of time.
It doesn't have fixed rules concerning its operating environment; it tracks
the resources granted to it by the operating system, and tries to adjust in
order to maximize the amount of resources it receives.  For instance,
allocating excessive virtual memory may result in the thrashing (swapping to
disk), slowing the process.  Now consider an operating system designed to
punish resource hogs by dropping a process's priority when it attempts to
allocate more than a certain number of resources.  The program will respond to
the punishment and to avoid such large allocations as a result.  But I think
few would grant the program a "core personality", "pain qualia", or "free
will".  (My view is that granting these things is more a matter of convention
than an issue of fact.)
-- 
<J Q B>

