Newsgroups: comp.ai,comp.robotics,comp.ai.philosophy
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!news.mathworks.com!hookup!swrinde!howland.reston.ans.net!agate!darkstar.UCSC.EDU!nic.scruz.net!earth.armory.com!rstevew
From: rstevew@armory.com (Richard Steven Walz)
Subject: Re: Minsky's new article
Organization: The Armory
Date: Fri, 9 Dec 1994 10:58:00 GMT
Message-ID: <D0JIGp.77y@armory.com>
References: <3agf03$qi5@mp.cs.niu.edu> <3bvoee$mg0@jetsam.ee.pdx.edu> <D0E6o9.2xu@armory.com> <3c322t$gd6@jetsam.ee.pdx.edu>
Sender: news@armory.com (Usenet News)
Nntp-Posting-Host: deepthought.armory.com
Lines: 96
Xref: glinda.oz.cs.cmu.edu comp.ai:25841 comp.robotics:16137 comp.ai.philosophy:23443

In article <3c322t$gd6@jetsam.ee.pdx.edu>,
Marcus Daniels <marcus@ee.pdx.edu> wrote:
>rstevew@armory.com (Richard Steven Walz) writes:
>
>>>Mathematics lets us weave together pieces
>>>of objective knowledge, and that is more than enough.
>>>
>>>It really sounds to me like you want have free will to be consistent
>>>with Occam's razor, and there isn't any empirical or practical need
>>>for free will.  Perhaps social, which is a somewhat depressing
>>>thought.
>
>>Don't mix teleology and sociology. They are unrelated!
>
>Why do you say that?  The idea of free will
>makes it easier to communicate with people, and easier for
>society to function in general--  much like religion.
------------------------------------
The idea of "free will" is not understood by the vast majority of human
monkeys who would say they believed it! They will say that criminals intend
their crimes in entirety, and they will then turn all the way around and
bemoan that, "there but for the grace of Gawd, go I"!! They take credit for
their thoughts and actions when those please them and deny they have
sufficient "willpower" when those don't please them!! Amusing, and very
Catholic/Jewish/Islamic! All Abrahamic religions are found in shaming and
blaming cultures! They are comical to watch! The "heathen/pagan" tribes who
never had that oppression do far better at understanding that one doesn't
have ultimate control of his internal "weather". They are MUCH more
relaxed! Greed born of guilt and shame is destroying the rainforests that
give us air. This primordial guilt and oppression is what lead the "Church
of the SubGenius" to declare the need for "Slack"! Slack is what less
"judge-mental" people give each other when they don't feel like working so
hard! This "ego-self" which is supposed to have "free will" is just
schizophrenia at work in this culture!
-Steve
 
>For me, it isn't a cynical comment, as that word is only really valid in 
>the context of free will, which I reject.  People have a tendency
>to create less-than-airtight arguments on the basis of things they want to
>believe, or are familiar with, rather than what is observable.
-----------------------------------
What is observed depends on what you believe!! Ever been in an argument
where two people could not see the other's point at all? There's an
example! There is no common reality, except that it is composed of our
individual realities!
-Steve

>Neil can only say that I must win via `victory by definition'.
>I admit to this, but will not concede the issue because I think my beliefs
>*exist* and are within the framework of existing cosmology.  
>He escapes with extreme subjectivism.  In spite of the conceivable
>possibility of non-free artificial intelligence beyond ours.
>Neil even goes so far as to say broadly that belief in well understood
>and heavily repeated mathematics is equivalent to nativism.
-------------------------------------------
Most religionists, which Neil is smarter than to reveal about himself, are
solipsists at heart, or modified solipsists, in that they admit a "few"
others into their world, if they "qualify" by worshipping them!
-Steve

>So I don't think in-principle arguments will be the ruin of free will,
>I think it will be in-practice implementation. 
------------------------------------------------
Free-will has been a dead issue in philosophy for a VERY long time, except
among, (who else?), reactionary theologians and republicans! Free will is
simply impossible to demonstrate. It is a meaningless term! Things are
either caused, or else they happen anyway, however you please, and only one
tomorrow that we can perceive occurs, each day! Only one future moment
follows each moment. Am I to believe that any different moment COULD have
followed the one just past? It is a ludicrous dialogue with these
superstitious goons! We are clearly determined down to whatever we will
ever be able to discern, and that's that! To assert UPON that that "well, I
STILL felt like I CAUSED that of my own free will and I actually COULD have
chosen otherwise, on a whim", is the height of comedy!!!! This "whim" thing
is nonsensical, and it is a form of Orwellian double-speak which sustains a
religious structure so flawed that they have had to threaten people with
death to get them to say they believed it!!! To control people, other
people have to believe that what each person does is entirely a voluntary
act, and that if it violates some notion, that it was out of simple
"cussedness" that the person "intentionally" did it!! They ignore human
hunger and the need for sex and they wish to control them by treating them
like perfect little machines for "Gawd". To get people to the point where
they work like a semblance of machines it is paradoxic that you must assert
that they are "free". The word "free" has no meaning except in law and
politics and religious church-states, where free is what you are if they
ever stop forcibly impeding your harmless acts! It is NOT a term in
philosophy!!!!!! It has no meaning in the study of mind!!! We clearly have
will, but it is NOT anything but that which we "seem" to feel we would like
to think or do. It is also, externally, none other than what we wind up
choosing, internally, and without a really very good explanation for it,
except an assertion after the fact!!! The thing that we feel most deeply is
"us" is only a witness to everything else that happens, even a witness to
what this "something-US" asserts that it thinks, internally, or does,
externally, when it is clear that this is plagerism!
-Steve Walz   rstevew@armory.com

