Free Will

[andrewducker]

I was intrigued to finally read Conway's Free Will Theorem and am amused to note that he gets all the way through it before deciding that as he feels like he has free will, therefore he has it, and this means that therefore individual particles have free will.  Which has to be one of the biggest examples of _almost_ thinking logically I've ever seen.

In addition:

and a biblical argument against Free Will that I was amused by.

All courtesy of The Old New Thing.

Comments

[meihua.livejournal.com]

"Any philosophy that allows a religious comet to trail off ablaze into the darkness of its last prospects makes suspicious everything about itself that it presents as science; presumably all this too is religion, although decked out as science."

[heron61.livejournal.com]

I'm not certain, but it does look to me like Conway has proved the universe is non-determinate which is clearly non-identical to free will, but is definitely sufficient to make me pleased with the universe.

[andrewducker]

Well, he's proved that people are as non-determinate as atoms. Whether that makes atoms non-determinate or people determinate is unclear...

[the-locster.livejournal.com]

I've never seen any evidence that people exhibit anything other than determinstic behaviour. Admittedly it's [sometimes] extremely complex behavior that responds dynamicaly to a chaotic environment, which at the subatomic level I think might be non-deterministic. So the path you take may not be determined, but how you respond to any given scenario quite clearly is IMO, unless you buy into the theory that biological brains utilise quantum computing (which I don't).

So yeh, that's cleared that one up ;)