Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site hou3c.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!hou3c!ka From: ka@hou3c.UUCP (Kenneth Almquist) Newsgroups: net.philosophy Subject: Re: Free will (What a silly concept!) Message-ID: <725@hou3c.UUCP> Date: Sat, 4-Aug-84 02:57:24 EDT Article-I.D.: hou3c.725 Posted: Sat Aug 4 02:57:24 1984 Date-Received: Sat, 4-Aug-84 23:51:02 EDT References: <23@ism780b.UUCP> Organization: Bell Labs, Holmdel, NJ Lines: 61 From Jim Balter: By my definition, I have free will if neither you nor I can predict my actions. At last, a definition so we have some idea of what we are talking about! The problem with this definition does not seem to capture what most people mean by free will. No one can predict when a given uranium atom will decay, yet uranium atoms are not generally viewed as having free will. Although many people would argue that a being does not have free will if its behavior can be predicted with perfect accuracy, it does not follow that behaving in a random fashion is the equivilant of posessing free will. Basicly, people use the concept of free will to argue that people are responsible for their actions; and free will as defined by Jim cannot be used for this purpose. As the title of this article suggests, I don't consider the concept of free will to be very useful, but the task of defining it is interesting so I will make an attempt. Going back to the notion of personal responsibility, it seems that what free will advocates are looking for is a means to counter arguments like, "It isn't his fault; he had a bad childhood". They want to be able to argue that the bad child- hood was not the cause of the person's actions. This suggests the following definition: A creature has free will iff that creature is the cause of its actions. OK, what does this mean? First, by the word creature I am referring to the mind of the creature. I hope that by now we are all agreed that it is possible to use the word "mind" to refer to an abstract concept, even if we disagree about the usefulness of this abstraction. That leaves the word "cause" to be defined, which is a biggie. I will hope that you have a general idea of what I mean and content myself with a few comments. Most (probably all, but I'm being cautious) events have an infinite number of causes. For example, why am I typing this article into the computer tonight? A believer in free will would answer that my mind is causing my fingers to move and type in this message. On the other hand, if somebody had dropped a 10,000 pound weight on me while I was walking into work today, my fingers would obviously be in no condition to type in this message. So the fact that nobody dropped a 10,000 pound weight on me today is also a cause. Clearly, I can think of an arbitrary number of other causes, so the question becomes "Which cause is the most meaningful." "Meaningfulness" is an aesthetic concept, and thus there is no precise way of measuring it, any more than you can have a precise yardstick for telling whether one piece of music is better than another. Thus whether you view my actions as caused by my mind, or by a combination of genetics and environment, is a matter of taste. Psychologists and sociologists are likely to view the concept of free will as an impediment to the construction of elegant theories of human behavior. Moral philosophers, on the other hand, are likely to view the concept of free will as indispensible to the construction of a satisfying system of ethics. There is no one correct answer to the question of whether free will exists because it is not a scientific concept, but a religious concept. If you define "free will" in such a way as to make it a scientific concept (which is what Jim did), then "free will" will no longer be a religious concept because religious truths cannot come from science, and most people will no longer care whether "free will" exists or not. Kenneth Almquist