|
|
Freewill
Read, Dwight ANTHRO (Read@ANTHRO.SSCNET.UCLA.EDU)
Thu, 19 May 1994 14:37:00 PDT
Riley commented in reply to Graber that randomness and free will are not the
same.
What is free will? It seems there are two questions: One, what processes
are going on in the brain between input sensory information and output
behavior. In a previous post I suggested that there could be a two level
process: a decision process that is largely deterministic that can be
overridden by an evaulative process that embeds the lower level deterministic
process into a higher, meta-level. Whether this is a reasonable model or
not, we can use it to note that were something like this operating, we could
ahve, at a conscious, language level, categorization of that override
process; i.e., we might categorize that process as free will. Thus the
decision makeing wouldn't constitute "free will" per se. Rather, "free will"
would be our perdception of what constitutes that decision process. This
leads to the second question: Is our perception that we have free will
merely our categorization of an underlying decision process--whatever may be
the form of that decision process"
D. Read
READ@ANTHRO.SSCNET.UCLA.EDU
|