(February 11, 2014 at 8:05 am)FreeTony Wrote:(February 10, 2014 at 9:11 pm)JuliaL Wrote: Easy. Repeat the situation and choose an alternate course of action.
Unfortunately this requires that you revisit the exact same spacetime coordinates to reset the universe for the second trial. So until Doc Brown lends you his Delorean I think you're out of luck.
Ah, but does it?
Let's take a computer, programmed to generate a random number between 0 and 1. If it is 0-0.5 it gives output A, and 0.5-1 output B.
I run the test and it outputs A. I re-run the test and it gives output B.
Does the computer have free will?
Firstly, no computer can give actual random numbers. All random number generators that I'm aware of are pseudo-random. And you're equating randomness with at least the folk notion of free will. That makes it more like random will.
But more importantly, you missed Julia's point. Rerunning a function is not the same as how she suggested to see if we have free will in the libertarian sense, i.e the ability to have done otherwise than you in fact did. What she said to do is to actually go back so that EVERYTHING was the exact same and see if the agent can actually change what they had done.