[Avodah] Free will vs. Physics

[Micha Berger]

On Sun, Oct 12, 2008 at 01:45:59PM -0400, david guttmann wrote:
:>If the person's decision is based entirely on a sum of the history of
:> things he experienced and the nature of his personality (both static and in
:> its propensities to evolve in various ways), then the soul is deterministic.
:> If so, his decision is entirely a product of things beyond the person's
:> control, and why should he be blamable for anything?

: But are not his past experiences a consequences of earlier bechirot he did
: and the same goes for his personality? Why limit Bechirah to this particular
: act without taking into the sum total of all past decisions and actions?

You're begging the question. How did that previous decision become his?
At some point, there is a first decision that was somehow neither random
nor determined by how he was made and what he experienced.

You can't explain decision number i based on decision nnumber i-1, as
i-1 woulld then have to be explained in terms of i-2, which in turn
gets you back to i-3, etc...

As I tried to summarize, the problem is
> Not a question about the decision itself, but about where the shift
> occurs
> from: a conflict of desires/goals the baby was either
>     (1) wired for, or
>     (2) forced into by experience plus wiring
> to: a conflict including a desire the person can be held accountable
> for having?

On Sun, Oct 12, 2008 at 12:07:10AM -0400, Yitzhak Grossman wrote:
:>: I think that you are conflating the concepts of 'algorithmic' and
:>: 'deterministic'.  Something can be noncomputable but perfectly
:>: deterministic, as Turing showed...

:> (Actually Turing didn't. What he showed was that there are problems that
:> aren't computable. He didn't prove there was a machine that could solve
:> them. Such a machine would be beyond algorithmic, but still deterministic
:> -- once we say it exists. But my problem is with determinism and
:> randomness, not really algorithm.)

: I don't understand your point here; what did I say that Turing showed
: that you deny that he did?

Turing proved that there are questions that can't be anwered by any
algorithm. He didn't show that there exists another mechnism that /can/
answer them. In order to show there are deterministic systems that
aren't algorithmic, you have to prove that there are systems that can
produce these predictable answers.

The human mind can't answer every question. How can we assume we could
leap over the Halting Problem to determine the solution to the version
written for our minds?

But in any case, we don't /want/ to prove that the mind is
deterministic.

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             It is harder to eat the day before Yom Kippur
micha at aishdas.org        with the proper intent than to fast on Yom
http://www.aishdas.org   Kippur with that intent.
Fax: (270) 514-1507                       - Rabbi Israel Salanter