[FRIAM] falsifying the lost opportunity updating mechanism for free will

[thompnickson2 at gmail.com]

Russ, 

 

I think he is saying the former.  And I think you and I agree that it follows from what he is saying that there is no ghost in the cartesian machine.  I predict he will assert that he is agnostic on that point.  Let’s see.  

 

Nick 

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

 <mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com

 <https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Russ Abbott
Sent: Thursday, June 18, 2020 6:26 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] falsifying the lost opportunity updating mechanism for free will

 

So you are defining a mechanism that by definition is mechanistic (perhaps with some randomness sprinkled over it) and then saying that it may look to some people like it seems to have free will? If that's what you're doing, what are you claiming that demonstrates? If that's not what you're doing, I'm afraid I still don't understand.

 

-- Russ Abbott                                       
Professor, Computer Science
California State University, Los Angeles

 

 

On Thu, Jun 18, 2020 at 2:44 PM ∄ uǝlƃ <gepropella at gmail.com <mailto:gepropella at gmail.com> > wrote:

Exactly! That's the point of the exercise. Marcus and Jon have pointed out that discussions of free will get bogged down in all sorts of meandering extra stuff. This is an attempt to have a discussion about it that doesn't go that way. The objective is to build a machine that might *look* as if it has free will.

The system does not *decide* to produce A or B, it simply produces A or B. The individual branch point (and the path taken) is *not* what I'm mapping to free will. (Yes, I've already been WRONGLY accused of redefining the term.) I'm saying that the aggregate phenomenon we mean when we say "free will" *might* be generated/simulated by this mechanism. I'm not mapping free will to one small part of the mechanism. I'm mapping it to the *whole* mechanism, multiple processes, including individual branch points, the composer, the memory, etc.

To answer specifically, a process can take branch A or B purely deterministically (with a rule like "always take path A"), pseudo-randomly (where it will always take branch A if the seed is the same), or actual randomly. Those are all options we can play with. But I'm not proposing any of those (by themselves) map to what we call free will. The whole mechanism is what I'm trying to map to free will, to simulate free will with.

On 6/18/20 2:29 PM, Russ Abbott wrote:
> Variables taking on values isn't something I normally associate with discussions of free will. 
> 
> Although since you mentioned it, how does the system decide whether to process A or B? Isn't that what you want to explain?

-- 
☣ uǝlƃ

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