Posted by
Friam mailing list on
Mar 22, 2003; 12:16pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Dennett-tp518288p518296.html
I should have said "predictability in principle".
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Frank C. Wimberly 505 995-8715 or 505
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http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/wimberly----- Original Message -----
From: Roger E Critchlow Jr
To:
[hidden email]
Sent: Saturday, March 22, 2003 9:53 AM
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Dennett?
Stephen Guerin wrote:
> How was Dennett's public lecture?
>
I thought it was quite interesting.
It certainly was a moment of high dramatic content when the
philosopher/cognitive scientist from Tufts announced to his Santa Fe
audience that he was using Conway's Life as a virtual laboratory for
exploring determinism, and assigning problem sets in it to his students.
Pity that his chosen version is Windows only -- I've found the source
for a very fast java version.
But I have to say that he appears to have written "Free Will Ignored" to
go along with "Consciousness Ignored", since his discussion of
"determinism does not imply inevitable" sort of ignores the fact that
"determinism does imply determined" which is what every schoolboy means
when they discuss the conflict between free will and determinism. His
thought seems to be specialized in ducking the subject that it appears
to be addressing, and then he acts hurt when people point it out.
There's a difference between opening a new aspect of an old question and
changing the old question beyond recognition.
That aside, I think the core of the talk was quite cogent. The point is
that living in a deterministic universe does not mean that life cannot
learn to act in a way that alters the outcome of situations. Life can
evolve to avoid bad stuff and to pursue good stuff.
It's odd that he seems to have independently converged to Stu's
definition of the agent, as an independent entity which does work to
avoid or pursue an outcome. (It's also interesting to think what Stu's
science of structures that allow one to perform work cycles would look
like in the virtual lab of Conway's Life. Or is there no way to define
work in Conway's Life?)
It's even odder that this same language of pursuit and avoidance
permeates Braitenberg's "Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology"
which is (yikes) almost 20 years old now.
So all we need is someone who can explain how the decision to pursue, to
avoid, or to do nothing can be held in abeyance indefinitely in the
mind, yet still be part of a deterministic universe.
-- rec --
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