Free will, perfection and limits on god

Sorry to butt-in, but robots can respond to environmental stimuli as well. It's a primitive kind of robot that has no external inputs.Robots have been built which use visual and tactile cues to move, to find energy, and to execute tasks. I don't see this as fundamentally different from how you describe animals. It's just a matter of scale.In other words, if I've got it right, in your view then, for each "possible" environmental input, animals' behavior is predetermined. But the ACTUAL behavior is not predetermined, because the ACTUAL environmental input is unknown.I don't disagree with your position, I just wanted to point out that it's really not different from how many robots work.AbE: Posted in admin-mode AGAIN! Grrr...This message has been edited by Ben, 05/05/2005 05:22 PM

I think you're right on for animals. Of course, inputs are too complex to ever be exactly the same. Furthermore, through "learning" and memory, the state of the animal (i.e. context) changes, thus the INTERNAL state is always different. Things change because of learning mechanisms, but I don't see any need for free will.I don't think things work differently for people. I think that discussing the matter philosophically is not too useful for people. We appear to ourselves to have free will, and in most circumstances, that is good enough. It's an ad-hoc theory that is useful in many circumstances.One idea I'm (still) trying to flesh out is how basing law and morality on this ad-hoc view of free-will often breaks down and leads to undesirable and "strange" results. But that's a post for holmes that I'm "working on" (i.e. the thoughts are there, but the writing and form are not quite done yet).I think as time goes on, I'm becoming much more pragmatic, much less idealistic, and what "the true fact is" seems less and less important and useful to me. So, I'm sorry if my answer seems indirect... but that's actually the way I think about things currently.AbE: That's 4 posts in a row in admin mode when I just wanted regular mode.This message has been edited by Ben, 05/05/2005 08:32 PM