Anyone for a math riddle??
 

If you know the answer.. give those that don't know a chance to work their brain.. :)

3 men went to a hotel and asked the clerk how much a room would be for the night. The clerk said, "That will be $10 each." The men paid for the room and a while later the clerk decided that he charged $5.00 too much. He told the bellhop to return the $5 to the men. As the bellhop was headed for their room he couldn't figure out how he would divide the $5 between the 3 men, so he decides to keep $2 so he could just give each man back $1.

Sooo.. if he gave each man back $1, that means that each of them just paid $9 for the room which = $27
The bellhop kept $2.. that makes $29... Where did the other dollar go?

Another riddle for you:

A man lives on the 20th floor of an apartment building. Every morning he leaves his apartment, get the elevator to the ground floor and goes to work.

Every evening he returns from work. He gets in the elevator on the ground floor, take the elevator to the 10th floor, gets out and climbs the stairs to his apartment UNLESS there are other people in the elevator or it is raining.

Why doesn't he take the elevator to the 20th floor every time?

30-5 = 25 / 3 = 8.33 + 1 = 9.33 *3 = 28 + 2 = 30

That is a good one


the problem is that you need to subtract 2 from 27 rather than add 2 to 27

confusing at first, tho

The guy's a midget....he can't reach the 20th button unless he has his umbrella (when it's raining)...hmmm midget with umbrella...a new niche... :Graucho

cause he's alone and it's not raining...

Yep. That answers it, too. People do things that don't make sense, so anything done by a person, including murdering 20 or 30 people for the hell of it, doesn't necessarily GET an explanation.

I personally am a determinist. I believe everything happens for a reason and couldn't have been otherwise. We just don't know the reason in many cases.

The funny thing about free will, is that no matter how you look at it, it seems impossible. If everything is governed by physical laws (science, chemistry, etc.), then nothing happens outside the bounds of those laws. No room for free will there. On the other hand, if someone wants to argue that, based on subatomic physics, things happen that aren't governed by any known physical laws and are more accurately described in terms of randomness (which actually has a set of laws all its own), does freedom come out of randomness. Personally, I don't see how. Because *intention* isn't there, and without intention how can we talk about will?

Very weird this concept of free will. Now there you have a REAL riddle!

why would you assume that intent is not part of the physical world? there have been 2 very well known experiments that have shown this to be true:

measuring light - a beam or a wave

and

the cat and the radiation

experimenters asked subjects to measure light - would they measure it as a light beam (a collection of particles) or a light wave - the determining factor was the subjects understanding of light - if they thought it was a beam, that is how it showed to be measured, if they thought of light as a wave then that is how the light showed to be measured.

almost everyone knows of the cat experiment - called Schrödinger's cat - in this experiment a cat is put inside a sealed box, there is an automatic hammer that is set to break open a glass container filled with a deadly poison - the hammer will react when enough radiation is released inside the box to set a gieger counter to a predetermined level that will be at the exact amount that could kill the cat or not kill the cat - the experiment was repeated with the experimenter asking the subjects to say wether they thought the cat was alive or dead - the cat lived or died based on the beliefs of the test subjects.

as they say curiosity "may" killed Schrödinger's cat.

**edited for spelling**

It may not be apparent but there is always some kind of logic behind every decision, although the result may be illogical. Free will is only a perception. The rules governing any free willed act are based on set of unsaid rules. We merely make the selection of the rules available to its respective act. So the randomness lies in the selection process and the capacity of each individual to understand and recognize all the rules pertaining each decision. There are governing laws, however the intention lies in the rule selection process.

These are not REAL experiments you are talking about, but "thought experiments" at best.

What intention changes in the case of light is how you proceed. It does not really magically change light into either a wave or a particle phenomenon. In fact, given the fact that light can be viewed as a wave or a particle, physicists frequently refer to photons as "wavicles."

Even so, how this could be extrapolated to rescue free will remains a mystery to me.

As for Schroedinger's Cat, it's a famous paradox. Paradoxes don't prove anything much, and certainly not that human beings have free will.

Physical laws are a set of rules also. I'm not sure this rescues free will.

At heart, I think free will is a concept that makes no sense from the start. It would mean there is something that obeys no law on the one hand, yet is not merely random on the other. I doubt if most of us can imagine what that might be.

In the light case there is a selection, wave or beam. The subjects only make a decision based on the selections (rules) they can understand. If the subject does not see all the rules then his selection is going to be based on the ones that he does understand.
A sort of an analogy to this would be a slot game. A slot machine game is random. In other words at any given time any one of the combinations can hit for a win. However the grand sceme outcome is set so that a) there are only a certain amount of possibilieis and b) the odds are set for payouts.
Does this mean the game is rigged or that there is a possibility of a random win?

True, physical laws that are on the molecular and atomic level are based on rigid laws but as you said anything smaller than that is kind of a mystery and not well understood just yet.
I believe even in the Physical laws of things such as Quarks, time and such there is randomness, hence our vast and abundant universe. I doubt that everything was preconceived

Everything is based on rules but the randomness of the application of the rules result in free will.

Technically, if all of the applicable laws were known and reliable numbers could be plugged in, it would be possible to know the outcome of any given "pull." For practical reasons, it is not. However, not knowing how human decisions are made doesn't make them free, although it may help us sustain the sensation that they are free.

Well, one result of believing in freedom is that people are then responsble for their actions, whereas if everything is determined, it's absurd to speak that way. Are you saying, then, that randomness makes A responsible for doing B, and if so, you seem to have left out the intervening premises.