virus: freely determined

Eva-Lise Carlstrom (eva-lise@efn.org)
Thu, 26 Dec 1996 17:22:16 -0800 (PST)


I believe in both free will and determinism.

>From an omniscient perspective (God, or a time traveler, or whatever),
everything is in a sense established 'already'. Time, taken as another
dimension, makes no difference, just as space makes no difference.

>From a human perspective, we each make decisions that change our perceived
futures. Even though these decisions consist of memes duking it out in
our individual minds which provide variously welcoming or unwelcoming
environments for them, and someone who knew *all* the variables could
perhaps figure out exactly what we would do, or at the very least
calculate the probabilities.

I, being a mere human, work from the human and thus free-will perspective,
because it is not useful to me to think that all my acts are
'predetermined', and I cannot know them until I've decided on them in any
case.

Eva