ElfSternberg
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ElfSternberg has not written any posts yet.
ElfSternberg has not written any posts yet.
@Robin: Dennett (Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting) points out that as our understanding of internal causation slowly comes to embrace and accurately describe the various mental processes that we currently describe as "conscious will," the courts are going to be seriously challenged over this distinction. Dennett's solution, that we will ultimately treat those brought before court as if every behavior were a product of free will and only worry about the most effective treatment, sounds right to me. Dennett points out that a weaker approach is incoherent and encourages the kind of cynicism I suspect Eliezer frets over.
@John: I think Eliezer did a good job of describing the problem in his followup to Anna, but I'm still having trouble convincing myself of the correctness of his statements. It feels to me like Eliezer is working hard to have these systems both ways: in his example of something historically effective but not psychologically effective, surely the psychological effectiveness, if it exists, is an emergent property of its historical effectiveness.
There ought to be an HTML entity for a lightbulb going on! Eliezer tickled my "invest more energy in this conversation" bias by mentioning ID vs. evolution, and there's a thought tickling the back of my head linking William Dembski's... (read 381 more words →)
I had the oddest reaction to the test: I couldn't take it. As a touch-typist and a Dvorak keyboardist, I could not easily remember where the "I" and the "E" keys were, since the keys themselves remain labeled in the more traditional style. I can't help but wonder if that qualifies as a bias all its own.