From: Damien Broderick (damien@ariel.ucs.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Thu Dec 03 1998 - 04:48:56 MST
At 01:51 PM 12/2/98 +0100, Anders wrote:
> As I see it free will is a macroscopic property
>of an agent being able to behave in a way that is hard to predict in
>general without simulating the whole agent
>So in my perspective, indeterminism isn't
>necessary for free will. But this can be debated for hours
I must be mad, getting into this. But here's my 2 cents:
If the mind is the brain/body in action, radical indeterminism of the
quantal kind *can't possibly* be the source of `free will'. We absolutely
do not regard random acts as `free' - in fact, they are as unfree as any
acts done under rigid coercion.
The loop-hole in this argument, as I (dimly) understand it, is the sort of
story told by non-monists such as Popper and Eccles. If it makes sense to
suppose that minds have (or are) a non-physical or `spiritual' component -
whatever that might mean - supervenient upon the hardware of the brain,
then perhaps quantal uncertainties can provide the entrance point to a
neural cascade causing the brain to enter specific states. Of course, this
just pushes back the issue of `freedom of the will' into a mysterious
impalpable black box, and one for which we have no independent evidence.
(But if there is anything to the claims of lab evidence for psi, which I
still find provocative [cf. PEAR, Dean Radin, etc], maybe we will be
obliged to take into account some such mysterioso realm of being and
perhaps consciousness.)
Damien Broderick
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