RE: Do animals have free Will?
February 11, 2012 at 12:08 pm
(This post was last modified: February 11, 2012 at 12:17 pm by The Grand Nudger.)
Then the programmer giving the computer inputs is not doing the programming either. A PC can also filter what it wishes- antivirus. A self taught behavior? Is learning self taught? I wasn't aware that it was.
Perhaps it was simply an expression of your ability to think clearly and assess a situation or concept dispassionately, developed over millions of years of trial and error with an untimely death as the penalty for failure?
Along the same lines, but slightly OT. Let's imagine for a moment that we discover AI. We might give this entity personhood (maybe because we make the case that it has free will), but I've always been amused that this same event would also easily justify removing the title of person from ourselves..since we could no longer be said to be different from a machine...we prefer the former over the latter. I mention this because It's not that I disagree with your position on much of this, but because I'm skeptical of any determination of what constitutes a thought, or free will, or personhood, etc, that arises from the minds of human beings. "Our" thoughts are somehow different, "our" programming is somehow our own, everything else is inferior by comparison because we use our own characteristics as the bar. I used AI above, but when I take a look around me (at things which exist outside of my little thought experiment), it's very difficult to distinguish exactly what is doing the programming, and exactly what is exhibiting "free will" from what is not.
Perhaps it was simply an expression of your ability to think clearly and assess a situation or concept dispassionately, developed over millions of years of trial and error with an untimely death as the penalty for failure?
Along the same lines, but slightly OT. Let's imagine for a moment that we discover AI. We might give this entity personhood (maybe because we make the case that it has free will), but I've always been amused that this same event would also easily justify removing the title of person from ourselves..since we could no longer be said to be different from a machine...we prefer the former over the latter. I mention this because It's not that I disagree with your position on much of this, but because I'm skeptical of any determination of what constitutes a thought, or free will, or personhood, etc, that arises from the minds of human beings. "Our" thoughts are somehow different, "our" programming is somehow our own, everything else is inferior by comparison because we use our own characteristics as the bar. I used AI above, but when I take a look around me (at things which exist outside of my little thought experiment), it's very difficult to distinguish exactly what is doing the programming, and exactly what is exhibiting "free will" from what is not.
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