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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
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Organization: Bell Labs, Holmdel, NJ
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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