cugini@ICST-ECF.ARPA (05/06/88)
larry@VLSI.JPL.NASA.GOV writes: > I'm surprised that no one has brought up the distinction between will and > free will. The latter (in the philosophy courses I took) implies complete > freedom to make choices, which for humans seems debatable. For instance, > I don't see how anyone can choose an alternative that they do not know > exists. Not in the philosophy courses I took. I think we all mean by "free will" *some* freedom - it's not clear what "complete" freedom even means. If I can freely (non-deterministically) choose between buying vanilla or chocolate, then I have (some) freedom of the will. yamauchi@SPEECH2.CS.CMU.EDU (Brian Yamauchi) writes: > As to whether this is "free" or not, it depends on your definition of > freedom. If freedom requires some force independent of genetics, > experience, and chance, then I suppose this is not free. If freedom > consists of allowing an individual to make his own decisions without > coercion from others, then this definition is just as compatible with > freedom as any other. This confuses freedom of action with freedom of the will. No one doubts that in the ordinary situation, there are no *external* constraints forcing me to choose vanilla or chocolate. If "free will" is defined as the mere absence of such constraints, then, trivially, I have free will; but that is not the significant question. We all agree that *if* I choose to buy chocolate, I will succeed; but this is better called "effective will" not "free will". The issue is whether indeed there are subtle internal constraints that make my choice itself causally inevitable. Spencer Star <STAR%LAVALVM1.BITNET@CORNELLC.CCS.CORNELL.EDU> writes: > Free will seems to me to mean that regardless of state 0 the agent > can choose which one of the possible states it will be in at time T. A > necessary precondition for free will is that the world be indeterministic. > This does not, however, seem to be a sufficient condition since radioactive > decay is indeterministic but the particles do not have free will. > Free will should certainly be more than just our inability to > predict an outcome, since that is consistent with limited knowledge in > a deterministic world. And it must be more than indeterminism. > My questions: > > Given these definitions, (1) What is free will for a machine? > (2) Please provide a test that will determine > if a machine has free will. The test should > be quantitative, repeatable, and unabiguous. So far, so good ... Note that an assertion of free will is (at least) a denial of causality, whose presence itself can be confirmed only inferentially (we never directly SEE the causing, as D. Hume reminds us). Well, in general, suppose we wanted to show that some event E had no cause - what would constitute a test? We're in a funny epistemological position because the usual scientific assumption is that events do have causes and it's up to us to find them. If we haven't found one yet, it's ascribed to our lack of cleverness, not lack of causality. So one can *disprove* free will by exhibiting the causal scheme it which our choice is embedded, just as one disproves "freedom of the tides". But it doesn't seem that one has any guarantee of being able to prove the absence of causality in a positive way. The indeterminism of electrons, etc, is accepted because the indeterminism is itself a consequence of an elaborate and well-confirmed theory; but we should not expect that such a theory-based rationale will always be available. Note in general that testing for absences is a tricky business - "there are no white crows". Assuming an exhaustive search is out of the question, all you can do is keep looking - after a while, if you don't find any, you just have to (freely?) decide what you want to believe (cf. "there are no causes of my decision to choose chocolate"). It's also worth pointing out that macro-indeterminism is not sufficient (though necessary) for free will. If we rigged up a robot to turn left or right depending on some microscopically indeterministic event (btw, this "magnification" of micro- to macro-indeterminism goes on all the time - nothing unusual), most of us would hardly credit such a robot as having free will. John Cugini <Cugini@icst-ecf.arpa> ------