From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!torn!cs.utexas.edu!sdd.hp.com!news.cs.indiana.edu!syscon!don Mon Aug 24 15:41:36 EDT 1992
Article 6676 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: don@syscon.rn.com (Don McLane)
Subject: Re: Freewill, chaos and digital systems 
Organization: Syscon Corporate Headquarters - South Bend, IN USA
Date: Fri, 21 Aug 1992 15:24:33 GMT
Message-ID: <1992Aug21.152433.3214@syscon.rn.com>
References: <Bt4xt1.MA0.1@cs.cmu.edu> <702@trwacs.fp.trw.com> <1992Aug19.144240.8058@syscon.rn.com>  <1992Aug19.192127.13867@saifr00.cfsat.honeywell.com>
Lines: 34

shanks@saifr00.cfsat.honeywell.com (Mark Shanks) writes:

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

>>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.

>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?

No, that's not what I meant. Freewill was a feeling, but disconnectedness
wasn't.  O.K., I see that it's not obvious, and I shouldn't go around
making up words like that and expect people to understand what I mean.
"Disconnectness" meant the lack of a knowable causable connection. In
a chaotic system the complexity is so high that it is computationally
intractable to calculate system behavior for very long.  Extending this
to the mind, I'm claiming we can't know how we arrived at a given
mental state.  But people had an intuition of this even before they
developed chaos theory (and quantum mechanics), and they called the
feeling freewill.

I think this addresses your objection; let me know if not.

Don McLane
don@syscon.rn.com



