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Pastimes : Ask John Galt...
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To: John Galt who wrote (681)10/29/1996 12:34:00 AM
From: Krowbar   of 4006
 
John, I am not confused. I believe to a high degree in randomness. You say you are certain of it. That is the fudamental difference between us. You are dogmatic and arrogant. I will modify my beliefs, but only with strong evidence to the contrary.

For example, the tides were once considered too complicated to fully understand even though many people noticed the link to the moon's sky positition. The tides still couldn't be acurately predicted so it was assumed there were random "unpredictable" effects on the tides. We now know this is not true. We can now predict the tides with great accuracy. The randomness disappeared. How can you be certain that this will not happen again when we fully undrstand other random systems?

I simply do not see evidence for "free will" in humans. You stated that animals are constantly calculating their next move, for instance when they are hunting. So is a computer calculating it's next move.

There was a great program on The Learning Channel tonight called "Alien Hand" about people that had the two halves of their brains surgically divided. Some of them had great difficulty controlling their hands because it seems the two brain halves wanted to do different things with the same body and could no longer talk to each other. Like having twins in one body that couldn't get along. Maybe this could be an explanation for free will in us normals. Two separate programs running in our heads that mostly agree, but synthesising a new thought when there is conflict.
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