I have started on the first assignment which only requires one to get a general feel of the different fields and ideas which one will be required to confront and to situate oneself within in order to be able to, in turn, also situate the ideas that will be taught. Ouch.
Anyways... Of the ideas that artificial intelligence needs to examine are the notions of free will and determinism. In my reading I discovered a philosophy called "Pessimistic Incompatabilism" which states that there is neither determinism nor free-will in this world!
Here is a definition of it from Wikipedia
Pessimistic Incompatibilism
While hard determinism clearly opposes the concept of free will, some suggest that even non-determinism might be incompatible with free will. This is pessimistic incompatibilism. Under the assertion that events are not predetermined (e.g., for quantum mechanical reasons), it is then suggested that any event has a probability assigned to it. Taking this concept further, it is suggested that an event is determined not by free will, but by the concept of randomness. For example, if there is a probability of 1% that one will delete this article, then whether or not it is deleted is not considered to be of free choice, but rather a brute random fact about the world. On this account, the notion of free will is considered a conceptual confusion, i.e. it does not exist in the sense which is misconceived, regardless of whether or not the universe is deterministic.
hmmm....
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