Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!AI.AI.MIT.EDU!NICK From: NICK@AI.AI.MIT.EDU (Nick Papadakis) Newsgroups: comp.ai.digest Subject: [LEVITT@Score.Stanford.EDU: Free Will] Message-ID: <19880606032002.3.NICK@INTERLAKEN.LCS.MIT.EDU> Date: 6 Jun 88 03:20:00 GMT Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU Organization: The Internet Lines: 96 Approved: ailist@ai.ai.mit.edu Date: Sun, 5 Jun 88 00:44 EDT From: Raymond E. LevittSubject: Free Will To: ailist@AI.AI.MIT.EDU Raymond E. Levitt Associate Professor Center for Integrated Facility Engineering Departments of Civil Engineering and Computer Science Stanford University ============================================================== Several colleagues and I would like to request that the free will debate - which seems endless - be set up on a different list with one of the more active contributors as a coordinator. The value of the AILIST as a source of current AI research issues, conferences, software queries and evaluations, etc., is diminished for us by having to plough through the philosophical dialectic in issue after issue of the AILIST. Perhaps you could run this message and take a poll of LIST readers to help decide this in a democratic way. Thanks for taking on the task of coordinating the AILIST. It is a great service to the community. Ray Levitt ------- [Editor's Note: Thank you, Mr. Levitt, and many thanks to all those who have written expressing interest or comments regarding AIList. I regret that I have not had time to respond to many of you individually, as I have lately been more concerned with the simple mechanics of generating digests and dealing with the average of sixty bounce messages per day than with the more substantive issues of moderation. However, a new COMSAT mail-delivery program is now orbiting, and we may perhaps be able to move away from the days of lost messages, week-long delays, and 50K digests ... My heartfelt apologies to all. Being rather new at this job, I have hesitated to express my opinion with respect to the free-will debate, preferring to retain the status quo and hoping that the problem would fix itself. But since Mr. Levitt is only the latest of several people who have complained about this particular issue, I feel I must take some action. Clearly this discussion is interesting and valuable to many of the participants, but equally clearly it is less so for many others. I have tried as far as possible to group the free-will discussions in digests apart from other matters, so people uninterested in the topic could simply 'delete' the offending digests unread. (There are many readers who only have access to the undigested stream and cannot do this.) Several people have suggested moving the discussion to a USENET list called 'tallk.philosophy'. The difficulty here is that AIList crosses USENET, INTERNET and BITNET, and not all readers would be able to contribute. In V7#6, John McCarthy said: > I am not sure that the discussion should progress further, but if > it does, I have a suggestion. Some neutral referee, e.g. the moderator, > should nominate principal discussants. Each principal discussant should > nominate issues and references. The referee should prune the list > of issues and references to a size that the discussants are willing > to deal with. They can accuse each other of ignorance if they > don't take into account the references, however perfunctorily. > Each discussant writes a general statement and a point-by-point > discussion of the issues at a length limited by the referee in > advance. Maybe the total length should be 20,000 words, > although 60,000 would make a book. After that's done we have another > free-for-all. I suggest four as the number of principal discussants > and volunteer to be one, but I believe that up to eight could > be accomodated without making the whole thing too unwieldy. > The principal discussants might like help from their allies. > > The proposed topic is "AI and free will". I would be more than willing to coordinate this effort, but I have, as yet, received no responses expressing an opinion one way or the other. I invite the readers of AIList who have found the free-will discussion interesting (as opposed to those who have not) to send me net mail at AILIST-REQUEST@AI.AI.MIT.EDU concerning the future of this discussion. Please send me a separate message, and do not intersperse your comments with other contributions, whether to the free-will debate or other matters. In the meantime, I will continue to send out digests covering the free-will topic, although separate from other material. - nick ]