Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cheiromancer" data-source="post: 2763686" data-attributes="member: 141">Well, the definition at <a href="http://Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/determinism-causal/" target="_blank">Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy</a> defines determinism as "given a specified way things are at a time t, the way things go thereafter is fixed as a matter of natural law."  But it points out that Laplace and Popper both expressed determinism in terms of predictability.  That may have been where your profs were coming from.  The notions are separable, but are also easy (and often useful) to commingle.  It's also easy (although less useful) to see determinism as entailing fatalism, but they are distinguishable too.Anyways, I don't want to go too far off topic.  I think that since computers share the same physical nature as we do, then if we are conscious and exhibit free will, the same could be true of computers. And if it is only an illusion on our part, then computers can suffer from the same illusion.  To cover my bases, I sometimes talk about "the experience of free will". Perhaps the computer chips that those computers use will be so small that quantum effects will render their precise operation unpredictable- I don't think this kind of unpredictability is required for them to be free or conscious, but I'm willing to grant that future computers might well be inherently unpredictable.I'll grant the point, but I really don't think there is a contradiction between being predictable and being free.  In fact, the reason why societies employ a system of reward, punishment and persuasion to control behavior is the thesis that free beings are predictable.  If you could not predict that people would seek rewards, avoid punishment and live their lives according to rational principles, then a society of free beings would be impossible.  People who egregiously flout the social code are judged to be insane, or at least suffering from a compulsion that has diminished their freedom.Or take the case of when a commitment is freely undertaken.  Marital fidelity, say.  Your behavior in respect to that commitment should be utterly predictable in the future, but I would regard marital fidelity as a continuous exercise in freedom, not a diminishment of it.Anyways, I think there is an intimate connection between consciousness and freedom.  Between having experiences and having the experience of free will.  If a system is capable of both perception and action, then the kind of modeling of the world necessary to have phenomenal consciousness is of the same order of complexity as the kind of causal modeling of the world necessary to have the experience of free will.</blockquote>

Verification