Posted: Mar 23, 2010 2:23 am
by mizvekov
Comte de St.-Germain wrote:
My apologies then. I thought your example was meant to imply that mice are actually unpredictable, to such a degree that even predators are unable to develop an evolutionary strategy to help catch them. The problem with optimal strategies in real life though, is that they necessarily ignore the environmental history of the organism - whilst it may be best for the mouse to alternate directions, it's not going to do this. The probability of it choosing left or right will be shaped almost entirely by it's history with each option.


Hence, psychological determinism. The fact that stochastic models are better at accounting for human and animal behaviour is because of the complexity and number of factors, not because of the essential unpredictability of human behaviour because 'neurons just fire randomly and thus shit happens randomly'.

So, the best models are stochastic ones, but you are sure it's actually deterministic because of...???
Is that a faith position?

Comte de St.-Germain wrote:
More importantly, this is completely divorced from free will. Indeed, the idea of randomness argues against free will, since whatever part of behaviour is up to chance is clearly not 'free' to be decided by the agent.

So, free will demands both non-randomness and non-determinism....