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"Buridan's ass" was a philosophical intuition pump to argue for the reality of free will. If we were really ultimately determined by our appetites, as the Neop

by yters 7y ago

"Buridan's ass" was a philosophical intuition pump to argue for the reality of free will. If we were really ultimately determined by our appetites, as the Neoplatonic determinists would have it, then we can construct a scenario where the perfectly determined ass would end up starving to death when surrounded by the foods it most craved. Since there are not dead asses all over the place, the philosophers took this as evidence that free will exists, even in asses.

mannykannot 7y ago
> Since there are not dead asses all over the place, the philosophers took this as evidence that free will exists, even in asses. That falls apart as soon as you consider how frequently the precise scenario is expected to occur. I hope no philosopher made an ass of himself by vigorously defending this particular form of the argument. That response is similar to the point made by one reviewer of an early version of the paper discussed here, that if this were a problem (in practice), it would have come to everyone's attention by now. The Dining Philosophers problem is similar to Buridan's Ass, in that you have hyper-rational actors at risk of starvation in the presence of food, but the critical difference that makes this a model of something that could happen in practice is that it involves each actor having to make two temporally-separated decisions, thus avoiding a singularity in time (though such singularities appear when you apply a locking solution.)
- yters 7y ago
  I don't think the scholastic philosophers were thinking the precise balance would happen in reality, but rather the very concept seemed absurd. That's the nature of intuition pumps. Not exactly a cut and dry deductive argument, but they show certain conclusions are most compatible with what seems to be common sense. And a general principle in philosophy is to try disrupting common sense conservatively, that on balance if one worldview is much more at odds with common sense than another worldview, the latter is preferred.

by yters 7y ago

mannykannot 7y ago

> Since there are not dead asses all over the place, the philosophers took this as evidence that free will exists, even in asses. That falls apart as soon as you consider how frequently the precise scenario is expected to occur. I hope no philosopher made an ass of himself by vigorously defending this particular form of the argument. That response is similar to the point made by one reviewer of an early version of the paper discussed here, that if this were a problem (in practice), it would have come to everyone's attention by now. The Dining Philosophers problem is similar to Buridan's Ass, in that you have hyper-rational actors at risk of starvation in the presence of food, but the critical difference that makes this a model of something that could happen in practice is that it involves each actor having to make two temporally-separated decisions, thus avoiding a singularity in time (though such singularities appear when you apply a locking solution.)

yters 7y ago
I don't think the scholastic philosophers were thinking the precise balance would happen in reality, but rather the very concept seemed absurd. That's the nature of intuition pumps. Not exactly a cut and dry deductive argument, but they show certain conclusions are most compatible with what seems to be common sense. And a general principle in philosophy is to try disrupting common sense conservatively, that on balance if one worldview is much more at odds with common sense than another worldview, the latter is preferred.