Dennett’s got an analogy to address how choice can be both deterministic and non-illusory. He asks his audience to consider a deterministic chess-playing algorithm. You can play the same game with this algorithm over and over—it doesn’t learn. If you look at its internal state, you can see it generating ply-reply trees and evaluating the positions thus generated. In this view, “making a choice” reduces to “running a decision-making algorithm”. The computer chess player doesn’t have the cognitive apparatus to have an illusory experience of doing anything, and yet it remains meaningful to speak of the reasons it has for making the choices it does.
HA, what do you think of this analogy? (tone: genuine curiosity)
Dennett’s got an analogy to address how choice can be both deterministic and non-illusory. He asks his audience to consider a deterministic chess-playing algorithm. You can play the same game with this algorithm over and over—it doesn’t learn. If you look at its internal state, you can see it generating ply-reply trees and evaluating the positions thus generated. In this view, “making a choice” reduces to “running a decision-making algorithm”. The computer chess player doesn’t have the cognitive apparatus to have an illusory experience of doing anything, and yet it remains meaningful to speak of the reasons it has for making the choices it does.
HA, what do you think of this analogy? (tone: genuine curiosity)
Free will is about free choices, choices that could have been different. Unfree choices are trivially compatible with determinism.