IUBio

minds and brains

Eugene Leitl eugene.leitl at lrz.uni-muenchen.de
Sat Jan 2 16:08:27 EST 1999


TONYJEFFS writes:
 > 
 > 
 > >I do not believe in free will but I do believe in choice. If one does not
 > believe
 > >in choice one's whole life is a lie.
 > I don't understand what you mean. Without free will, choice becomes a simple
 > gate function with a predictable outcome. Not much of a choice.

This is off-topic for bionet.neuroscience, but there are things like
true randomness (from quantum noise) and then there is nonpredictable
determinism. The latter meaning: yes, the system is deterministic, and
no, I can't predict what its state will be at t+n without going
through the same tedium of the statespace evolution as the system you
want to skry about. Phase space regions with strongly divergent
Hamiltonians, short of infinite precision, are intrinsically nonsimulable.

So, in a sense you're fencing with phantoms. Free will vs. no free
will should be burned on Tomaso de Aquinas heap of straw, to not tempt
modern Buridanuses to spin it into gold. Or something like that.

ciao,
'gene

 > My PC has choice, perhaps.  I press a key, and the computer chooses to
 > reproduce the letter represented by the keypress.
 > If I put it under pressure by running too many big programs at once, it may
 > choose to crash.  But this is a mathematically calculable choice depending upon
 > how much memory it requires and has available.  
 > 
 > Choice without free will seems like no choice at all.



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