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Old 11-14-2005, 12:12 AM
hmkpoker hmkpoker is offline
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Join Date: Jan 2005
Location: New Jersey
Posts: 116
Default Zeroing in on free will

I know this has been done before, but I really want a good answer to this challenge; a philosophical/hypothetical one, not a scriptural one. (link me to one if it already exists)

Let us say that there is another planet, identical to Earth in every concievable way, down to the molecule. Same people, same animals, same families, etc. etc. etc.

Person A (who resides on Earth) and Person A' (who resides on our parallel planet) are both born into identical families with identical genetics and identical environments. God gives each a soul, and the power of free will.

Twenty years later, A and A' mature and walk down the street where they are hassled by person B and B' respectively. A gives B some money; A' kills B'. Different choices were made, because they each had free will.

Something must cause an action. Either 1) the soul of A had a different quality than the soul of A', or 2) the souls act at random.

Explain how another possibility could exist that explains this phenomenon.

__________________________________________________ __________

Secondly, a neat little idea I was thinking about before:

A certain robot is programmed with a random number generator; whenever someone asks for a random number, it automatically takes the millisecond from its clock, enters it as a variable, and out comes a random number between 1 and 10.

However, the program exists outside of its main OS (or whatever), and the robot can't detect the presence of this program. It readily uses its RNG, but doesn't know that it exists.

The robot believes it has free will.
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