opti:"I assume free will exists and that if you disagreed with it, you'd have to prove you were right. Each side likes to think that the default belongs to them."
personally i believe in it, and have my "own ideas" why. but objectively speaking.. I cant discount those who don't.
opti:"..for instance that all decisions actually proceed from the unconscious mind and the conscious affirmation of them isn't decision-making at all."
yea. anything involved with consciousness is.. well.. complicated at the least. lol.
and we are also emotional creatures.. i even heard some experts go as far as to say that all our decision making are intercepted by our emotions. I know for a fact that there is some truth to that, just dont know to what extent.
looks like elmer knows he doesnt have any REAL answers and's starting to get into bonehead philosophy. which for yrs he vehemently wrote off. lol...luvit !!
here...
elroch:"I feel John Conway et al got it right when they identified free will as the unpredictable (i.e. random) part of human behaviour."
as far as i remember Conway do not believe in randomness, he has an "alternative" belief which i cannot remember from the top of my head. Please quote him say that.
I can do better - here is the Conway and Kochen paper.
However, there is an important correction to my memory. The paper itself is agnostic on the existence of free will. Rather than assuming this (which is identical to assuming that people have a component to their behaviour that is independent of all possible pre-existing information in the world), the paper discusses the consequences conditional on this being true. This is a very precise approach - myself I would be happy to start with the knowledge that this is so because humans are quantum mechanical objects and random behaviour is a universal consequence of that (Heisenberg's uncertainty principle implies it). While some mistakenly claim this is not necessarily so for a macroscopic object, the truth is that there is always at least some randomness present.
A main conclusion of the paper is that IF people have "free will", so do elementary particles. As treated in this paper, there is no distinction between randomness and something caused by some mysterious unknown separate entity and, I am rather sure, there never can be. It is fundamentally impossible to distinguish between randomness and a cause which has no relationship to a separate source of information (indeed you can essentially define randomness as that which is caused solely by an unknown cause. There is an important technical point here - when there are multiple events, "unknown" has to be extended to included all of the previous events. i.e. all of the results of previous events don't provide any information about the current one. Its cause is completely unknown).
elroch:"I feel John Conway et al got it right when they identified free will as the unpredictable (i.e. random) part of human behaviour."
as far as i remember Conway do not believe in randomness, he has an "alternative" belief which i cannot remember from the top of my head. Please quote him say that.
I can do better - here is the Conway and Kochen paper.
However, there is an important correction to my memory. The paper itself is agnostic on the existence of free will. Rather than assuming this (which is identical to assuming that people have a component to their behaviour that is independent of all possible pre-existing information in the world), the paper discusses the consequences conditional on this being true. This is a very precise approach - myself I would be happy to start with the knowledge that this is so because humans are quantum mechanical objects and random behaviour is a universal consequence of that (Heisenberg's uncertainty principle implies it). While some mistakenly claim this is not necessarily so for a macroscopic object, the truth is that there is always at least some randomness present.
A main conclusion of the paper is that IF people have "free will", so do elementary particles. As treated in this paper, there is no distinction between randomness and something caused by some mysterious unknown separate entity and, I am rather sure, there never can be. It is fundamentally impossible to distinguish between randomness and a cause which has no relationship to a separate source of information (indeed you can essentially define randomness as that which is caused solely by an unknown cause. There is an important technical point here - when there are multiple events, "unknown" has to be extended to included all of the previous events. i.e. all of the results of previous events don't provide any information about the current one. Its cause is completely unknown).
well.. you sound very knowledgeable and confidence that's for sure! but are you really? lets ask Conway shall we? after all its his paper..
Conway:"If we have free will then the indeterminacy of the particles can’t be explained by randomness."
so basically you failed to understand the paper, yet still speak about it with such confidence. like so many of your other posts. i should really stop wasting my time on you.
you can read the rest here..
https://plus.maths.org/content/john-conway-discovering-free-will-part-iii
EDIT: on reflection (and on reading the fuller versions of the quotes you referred to), I am forced to join the many others who concluded that Conway is trying to make a distinction that doesn't exist (between "free will" and "randomness". Thank you for leading me to this realisation.
First, it's worth observing that randomness is relative. This is important if you compare the viewpoints of someone who has made a choice and someone who does not know that choice. Other examples:
In this case I am taking the viewpoint of someone outside of the person, Conway's comment refers to a viewpoint where someone knows the choices of the person (eg that person).
To quote Conway further:
"I know what I mean by humans having free will," says Conway, picking up one of two pens lying on the table before us. "I believe, and you don’t have to, that I just picked up this pen and it wasn’t determined at the start of the Big Bang; it’s not a function of the past history of the Universe. I think I just did that in the last few seconds and before then, there was nothing in the world that you could have analysed to tell you that I would do that."
"It follows [from the Free Will Theorem] that particles have that same kind of free will. The particles will either emerge on the left- or right-hand side of a screen [depending on whether their squared spin is 1 or 0, see part II], and .which a particle will do is not a predetermined function of the past Even if you knew the entire past history of the universe (in any inertial coordinate frame) this would not contain the information about what the particles will do in the experiment."
Each of the the two chunks of bold text is 100% consistent with the "choice" being random in the strongest sense (no-one and nothing has any information which allows prediction of the "choice"). Indeed they are essentially a definition of something being random. It's just that because it was a human choice it is referred to as free will. Conway's argument can be viewed as showing it's not special in that its defining characteristics are reflected in the behaviour of a particle. "Choices" are really nothing special, of course. They are just aspects of behaviour. An unconscious choice is only different to a conscious one in that it doesn't activate a special part of a brain.
Here are some of those other people's views that I referred to at the start (as summarised by Wikipedia):
<<According to Cator and Landsman, Conway and Kochen prove that "determinism is incompatible with a number of a priori desirable assumptions". Cator and Landsman compare the Min assumption to the locality assumption in Bell's theorem and conclude in the strong free will theorem's favor that it "uses fewer assumptions than Bell’s 1964 theorem, as no appeal to probability theory is made". The philosopher David Hodgson supports this theorem as showing quite conclusively that "science does not support determinism": that quantum mechanics proves that particles do indeed behave in a way that is not a function of the past.>>
There is nothing I have issue with in those views. Do you?
i'll look at it later.. in the meantime, please unblock opti, and appeal to CC to make sure its a short mute.. he offered you an olive branch, you should take it.. thanks in advance.
That looks like a good book, Ghostess.
well itsa comedy drama. theres a feminism thingy in there where rousseau is talked abt for suggesting a inferior ed. system for women. and now ?...my relative goes to rousseau school in montreal ! (its girl-boy...ohh the irony ::/)
just after ww2 beauvoir wrote that women are free (breaking chains from occupied france ?) to make up what it means to be female. uknow that its as flexible as so desired. is society making us up ? are we tabula rasa'd ? OR are we just bio-determined ? i feel probably a little a each. just me.
and ste. did freud go & HAFTA say anatomy is destiny ? cuz if so ?...then since he seemed only qualified to speak for men ?...maybe he wuz deducing ? not sure. but it wouldnt seem fair.
FW vs D. funny that stateside woman-man traditions are on this elastic path. not really sure where were going but 3 ppl wanna marriage license in portland (or maybe seattle not sure). lol ! AND i hadda nephew. and now i have a niece 
. also i have acq's that adopted a baby girl awhile back. theyre 3 women. equal share. do 3 moms make a dad ? hilarious !
sorry for rambling on. plz accept me. heres one...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZE6eJiWA_no
... !
"I am forced to join the many others who concluded that Conway is trying to make a distinction that doesn't exist (between "free will" and "randomness"
yes, thats why i was surprised that you even brought up conways theorem.
if you reject his assertion that freewill is a genuine choice, neither random or deterministic then you might as well reject his paper all together because its no longer useful to you.
Actually most people regard it in a more positive way as proving the irreducibly random nature of the Universe using weaker axioms than Bell's theorem (has not a quote to that effect already been posted here?). Conway's idiosyncrasy is merely to artificially distinguish the randomness in human behaviour.
"I am forced to join the many others who concluded that Conway is trying to make a distinction that doesn't exist (between "free will" and "randomness"
yes, thats why i was surprised that you even brought up conways theorem.
if you reject his assertion that freewill is a genuine choice, neither random or deterministic then you might as well reject his paper all together because its no longer useful to you.
[snipped unreasoned pontification]
First note that what "free will" is is a SEMANTIC question. It is not a necessary one, because it has been already defined to general agreement. To quote Wikipedia's summary (see two primary sources):
"free will is the capacity of agents to choose between different possible courses of action unimpeded"
"Free will" acts like randomness in that its outcomes are difficult to predict but they aren't impossible to predict.
No. If the outcome can be successfully predicted, other options are impeded to the maximum possible degree. See quoted definition above.
I hope that Uke understands that it was probably Elroch who deliberately got me muted
Your hope is in vain, as no-one can get you muted without you providing the reason. It is safe to say that one particularly appalling post of yours was a factor. Obviously, I can't be 100% sure how many other factors there were.
whereas he may think I got him muted
No, never have, nor do I have reason to believe you have been in a position to do so. The sole recent example was verified to be a false positive by a chess.com bot and I was given 2 months' free membership.
but it definitely was not I.
Don't fret about being falsely credited as being a less than ideally coded bot. You weren't.
Certain people around here ought to be ashamed of themselves for turning what should be a pleasant and interesting conversation into a war where they absolutely have to be seen to come out on top.
There is nothing wrong with coming out on top, but don't make the mistake of thinking being maximally toxic and abusive to the point of being muted by chess.com is any sort of alternative to using authoritative sources and valid reasoning in a detached scientific manner.
i dont understand why it has to be such a semantic mud pool. why cant they just give it new names or words that actually represent their meaning. and then define them separately.
for example.. genuine FW, random FW, legal FW, and so on..
Where there is a need for a new term, starting with a definition of that term is necessary and laudable. It is necessary because any statement involving a new term is not meaningful without that term being defined. There is a psychological trap here - a sentence involving an undefined term has the appearance of meaning, because we habitually assume all the terms in a sentence already have established meanings.
not a new term.. new terms.
elroch:"I feel John Conway et al got it right when they identified free will as the unpredictable (i.e. random) part of human behaviour."
as far as i remember Conway do not believe in randomness, he has an "alternative" belief which i cannot remember from the top of my head. Please quote him say that.