Re: falsifying the lost opportunity updating mechanism for free will

Posted by Frank Wimberly-2 on Jun 18, 2020; 10:25pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/falsifying-the-lost-opportunity-updating-mechanism-for-free-will-tp7597285p7597294.html

Your abstract description, that Russ asked you to clarify with an example, reminded me of my life:

Me - I have to file these papers, bring in the mail, call the pharmacy, put away the car, read Glen's email, chase the coyote out of the meadow, etc

Grandson - Grandpa, has to login to the computer so I can play Garry's Mod, Grandma has to get me a soft drink, and I'm going to ask for a brownie, etc.

Wife - Frank has to figure out why all the words in the emails I write have squiggly red lines under them, Matthew has to wash his hands, I have to clean all the face masks and disinfect the groceries, I have to start dinner after finding out what they want, etc.

All these agendas are executed simultaneously.

I have no free will.

Frank

On Thu, Jun 18, 2020, 3:44 PM ∄ uǝlƃ <[hidden email]> 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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