> "THE BORG" wrote in messagenews:c%%A4i.1062$I55.1020@newsfe2-gui.ntli.net...
>

>> "Don Stockbauer" gmail.com> wrote in message
>>news:1179835052.664634.225750@b40g2000prd.googlegroups.com...

>>> HHFW.

>

>>> (Humans have free will.)

>

>> Humans may have free will - but it is also possible to know humans so well
>> that you can know well in advance what they are going to do - say - or
>> think.
>> You may put something in front of a human - say a really interesting book -
>> and the human may be interested - pick it up - buy it - read it or they may
>> not. This is free will. But if you know this human very well - you would
>> know whether he will pick up the book and buy and read or not.
>> Thus the future is known.

>
> I'm not so sure. There are some situations (a scene involving Wallace Shawn
> in "The Princess Bride" comes to mind) in which it is to a person's advantage
> to be unpredictable. So, for these situations, it is not to our advantage
> to let anyone know us well enough to predict our responses. Whether these
> kinds of situations have come up often enough so that natural selection has
> given us 'genes for unpredictability', I don't know. But I do suspect that
> in an evolutionary 'arms race' between ability to predict and ability to
> be unpredictable, unpredictability wins. It is easier to produce.