[gyim]

"If you always knew the wise thing to do, would you ever choose the unwise path?"

Yes, people do that. When someone cheats on his/her spouse, is it because it seems to be the wise path? No, it's quite likely that such a person knows that it is wrong, unethical, and also very unwise - and still do it. And we all do this in smaller things all the time: e.g. exercising our ego and being rude to each other when we know that it will only make things worse; eating a lot of junk food when we know that it will make us unhealthy - and so on.

People are not just rational minds: we also have instincts and emotions. Free will is not about finding the solution to a logical problem: it is about balancing between these things.

Just think about how you could define an algorithm for solving an ethical dilemma. What is your algorithm? What is Mother Theresa's algorithm? What would happen if everybody had the same (supposedly ideal) algorithm, and would kill / self-sacrifice in the same kinds of situations? Would we survive at all?

If transferring our minds to software would be possible, would we want to transfer our emotions or instincts to this software at all? Would we really want to live as robots, or would we want to keep something "human" too?