From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Mon Aug 16 1999 - 08:54:30 MDT
At 12:16 AM 15/08/99 -0400, John K Clark wrote:
> Free Will
>is the inability to always know what you will do next, and not know when
>you'll not know, even in an unchanging environment.
No, that's just a side consequence. The idea that humans have (a faculty
of) free will is surely an attempt to formalise or account for the tussle
we often experience when we are impelled by `mixed motives'. We momentarily
become aware of the usually inaccessible seething of the society of mind or
self parliament. `Training the character' is a way of increasing the
likelihood of one set of behavioral algorithms winning out over another,
one that tends, presumably, to suppress one's consciousness of the bidding
alternatives. To what extent an executive decision can actually prevail
over the appetites is unclear to me, or what it comprises (that is, what is
the `ontology' of the self in question), but *randomness* and/or
*unknowability of alternatives* are not part of that obscurity.
Damien Broderick
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