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From: mangoe@umcp-cs.UUCP (Charley Wingate)
Newsgroups: net.philosophy
Subject: Re: What do people mean by free will?
Message-ID: <1267@umcp-cs.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 16-Aug-85 08:06:24 EDT
Article-I.D.: umcp-cs.1267
Posted: Fri Aug 16 08:06:24 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 21-Aug-85 06:09:43 EDT
References: <1195@umcp-cs.UUCP> <596@mmintl.UUCP>
Organization: U of Maryland, Computer Science Dept., College Park, MD
Lines: 74

In article <596@mmintl.UUCP> franka@mmintl.UUCP (Frank Adams) writes:

>>The oldest notion seems to be of souls: beings of pure will.  I think that
>>at this time we can reject this hypothesis, or at least set it aside until
>>there is better evidence.

>> Yet it seems to me that the reluctance to call it free choice seems to
>> me to stem from an unconcious attachment to the first model I presented.
>> Only if you perceive Will to be some sort of substance does this present
>> a problem.  If Will is simply the process of choosing, then I would
>> submit that what we have here deserves the name of free will.

>I didn't say what I meant by free will because I am not sure exactly
>what it is I do mean.  Actually, I don't think free will is a form of
>will, at all.

Well, Free Will is certainly a statement about the nature of will.

>Paul Torek, in answer to a point I made, makes a distinction between
>free will, which is the absence of internal constraint, and freedom
>(simpliciter), which is the absence of external constraint.  I would
>suggest that free will be further broken up into free thought, and
>free will proper.  Free will proper refers to one's ability to convert
>one's intentions into volition.  (This is violated more often than might
>be thought.  It occurs any time sloth or emotion overcomes one's
>intentions.)

>I do not think there is any question about the existence of free
>will proper, as defined here.  It is free thought whose existence
>and/or meaning is in question.  This includes both ideas and decisions,
>although the latter is more closely related to the original idea
>of free will.

>Subjectively, it seems that my decisions are neither determined nor
>random.  Certainly many decisions are made on a purely rational basis.
>But decisions about objectives do not have this property in general.
>This gets a bit muddled here, because the distinction between ends and
>means is not at all clear-cut.  It is not entirely clear that one can
>ever make decisions which are truly about ultimate objectives, and not
>about intermediate objectives.  But it seems like one can.

>I'm afraid I don't see randomness as being any closer to freedom than
>determinism is.  If I flip a coin, is it "free" to come up either heads
>or tails?  (Leave aside the question of whether it's movement is truly
>random; assume it is.)  There is some sense of the word free in which it
>is -- it is not externally constrained.  But it makes no choices; it
>is just random.

Here we run into that bugaboo again.  It makes all the difference in the world
what lies behind the phrase "it [the coin] makes no choices."  First of all,
one could argue that the random forces all come from outside the coin.  But
laying that aside for the moment, why do I get this feeling that the author
of the above was thinking, "It makes no choices because it has no mind"?

>Ultimately, this gets down to the question of subjective reality --
>a debate raging right now (that's raging, as in raging forest fire).
>Perhaps I will express my opinions on that later, if I can figure out
>what they are.

I think a stronger statement is in order: the whole nature of consciousness
and the mind is in question.  Now, unless someone out there has some great
revelation to deliver on the subject, I think it's safe to say that we know
nothing about this.  There seems to be a strong tendency to talk about the
mind in terms that are only appropriate to souls, or, alternately, to simply
speak ex cathedra on the basis of Newtonian mechanics and state that we
don't need to know anything about the nature of the mind to substaniate
whatever claim is being made.  Given both the failure to conceptualize and
the lack of any real knowledge to appeal to, I suggest that it is time to
end this discussion-- unless someone can get past either of these problems.

Charley Wingate   umcp-cs!mangoe

 "Do you know what this means?
  It means that this damn thing doesn't work at all!"