STRIP FOR May 30, 1993

Hey, gormadoc, Hip, hip and tallyho! I totally agree with your description--very concise and to the point. Thanks for commenting.

Norm

The human mind is pretty much just a complex machine that accounts for many factors. Emotion, morality, and beliefs are just ways to choose all actions. But since the brain is an organic machine, it will react the same if put in the same situation more than once with all the same factors and no information of the other outcome, so the reaction is set in stone. Chaos is unpredictable because of too many factors, not because it is random, so each happening is set in stone. Free will is an illusion, but we feel we choose the result, and we cannot predict all results of people or outcomes, so we cannot 'program' to it. I may know someone well enough to think I know, but the brain has way too many neural connections to always predict accurately. It doesn't mean it's impossible, just hard to do and has room for many errors.
I believe in the illusion of free will, but not actual free will.

@xfacex: Apropos "If we don't have free will, that must mean we are a deterministic (finite state) machine": I see a leap in logic here - absence of free will doesn't necessarily imply that we are deterministic, for there is the possibility that, even given complete knowledge of initial conditions, it is not possible to know future states (one of the precepts of pop chaos theory).

The other bit "and we cannot be accounted for our actions" is really independent of the free will problem. Crime and punishment are entirely cultural. In some (all?) parts of the world, these things depend upon gender, sexuality, access to liquidity, religion, race, tradition, age etc. etc.

dear xfacex. The fact that we can't predict erratic behavior doesn't mean we aren't determined, it just means that we're not intelligent or knowledgeable enough to predict erratic behavior, even though we might seriously want to. Which reminds me of an old Dave Gardner joke: Two cavemen were sitting around pounding rocks together when one turns to the other and says, "Man, we ain't never gonna have radio." And here we are chatting on the internet. Keep the faith!