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It's odd to say society must believe that they possess a freedom which isn't really there. Of course, in punishing me, you are not responsible, but by exposing

• nessus42 14y ago
  The world is almost certainly deterministic. Either that, or the cosmos is rolling dice in quantum mechanics wave collapse. It's hard to see how any sort of mystical "free will" can come out of a random number generator. We are all just very complex computer programs running on meat machines. These revelations make the common mystical use of the term "free will" rather meaningless. What could it possibly amount to? That you have a different mind living in your "soul" that makes your real decisions for you, while your physical brain is just some sort of fancy transceiver? That's rather doubtful, if you ask me. On the other hand, the notion of "free will" that no one is holding a gun to your head still stands. On the philosophical issue of whom to hold responsible for intelligent computer programs gone terribly wrong, I'm not sure that there is any real answer to that question. What should be clear, however, is that society has a right to defend itself against such rogue entities and to disincentivize such entities from doing bad things. What should also be clear, however, is that there is no moral good to increasing the suffering of people (i.e., intelligent programs) just because they happened to get saddled with a bum program.