OCT 19

14: OCT 19: Unit 4: Free Will and Culture

Dennett, Daniel. Chapter 2: "A Tool for Thinking about Determinism" Freedom Evolves. (300) (25-63) (Jo/Erik)

Laplace's demon -- first modern expression of scientific determinism, idea of being able to predict all future states of a system from knowing the position and movement of everything at some moment.

Dennett suggests we design a "toy problem" to think about this image of the "demon". Draws on Quine's concept of "democritean universe". Really trying to model a "design space" (term from Darwin's Dangerous Idea) in the Library of Babel and the idea of "Vast" and "Vanishing"

34: You could makes some Universes deterministic and some indeterministic. read. Indeterminate universes exclude Laplace's Demon. Determinism is just one kind of regularity a universe can display. Eliminable vs. Ineliminable probabilities.

36: To make the point a different way, he turns to Conway's Life World research. (Artificial life.)
translation rules are like physics in a real world.
Initially, the deterministic "life worlds" look like our stereotype of determinism. boring.
But with more translation rules, we get more complex events. At the design level, we have persistent objects in motion, contingencies ("usually this happens"). But at the physical level, there is no motion, only on and off. (How do you design creatures that can survive?)
43: Some objects in the life world have powers just by virtue of their shape (and the "physics"). Like walls. “Avoidance” might be more expensive.
Persisting might include "avoiding" impending harms that are predictable. "The birth of avoidance." 43

In this model, you still have "hacker Gods" designing the creatures. You could eliminate the hacker Gods by building the "r&d" into the creature. This is a move from the design stance to the intentional stance. This is also a feature of an evolutionary "life world". You might just need life worlds that can have "Universal Touring Machines" -- which means they can solve any computable problem. Conway shows that his life worlds can instantiate Touring machines. (48)

51: describes a feature of genetic history of dealing with parasitic genes: design problem, solution in design space, "actions taken". (Note than design and intentional terms are very apt here, even when talking about fruit fly genomes that don’t really “know” what the hell is happening to them.)

2. It's not real avoidance. Real avoidance changes something that "was going to happen" into something that doesn't happen.

depends upon meaning of "going to happen". Avoiding a baseball coming at you is real avoiding even if the ball was never going to hit you because of your avoidance system. You can also avoid avoiding (get hit by the ball on purpose to get on base). And so on... avoid avoiding avoiding.

you can only change anticipated outcomes, and that's what we are doing in "determined avoiding".

4 (60). The creatures in the life world have their powers "inevitably" thanks to the determinism of that world. They are just what they are due to their starting points and events. “Determinism is the friend, not the foe, of those who dislike inevitability.” (You could use this to make a strong claim that we can only have free will in a universe that is at least partly deterministic.)

This is exactly the link between "determined" and "inevitable" that D wants to break. Our powers are determined by the past, but that doesn't mean our actions are inevitable.

Bonus argument: inevitability is also a feature of indeterminist worlds. You can't dodge an undetermined lightning bolt. (That suggests we are packing something illicit into the term when we think it only spoils free will in a determinist world.)