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Old 11-05-2005, 06:31 PM
ZeeJustin ZeeJustin is offline
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Join Date: Jul 2003
Location: Northern VA (near DC)
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Default Re: How can randomness possibly exist?

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and am not making any conclusions.

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Ok, sorry, so you haven't decided to believe we don't have free will. good. we can talk :-)

I don't relate well to the concept of 'believe in', more along the lines of "at this point my knowledge of the evidence seems to point to XYZ". With free will, as interesting at it is to discuss, if we found out we didn't have it we'd not do anything different. hmmmm.
We seem to have no choice but to act as if we have it, however it works at whatever level of quantum or otherwise.

One, of many, ways to approach it is from the question .. why would this experience of having free will exist if it was serving no purpose for us? To use the horrid computer analogy, we have some pretty impressive computer programs solving complex problems, we've never felt the need to program them with a 'feeling' of free will. Is there some level of complex self-referential intelligence that an illusion of free will emerges and it doesn't have to be programmed in?

Free will suffers from the ill-formed question problem, I don't know ( outside of Dennett's work) any clear statement of what free will is in any specifically useful way, and until that happens it seems premature to try and definitively answer 'does It exist?'. It may well exist if we define it in some meaningful way. Randomness doesn't seem to help, but..?

luckyme, .... I had this extra ink..

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Sorry, but this thread was not meant to be about free will. I should have left that line out of my OP.
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