Physicist Unveils a 'Turing Test' For Free Will 401
KentuckyFC writes "The problem of free will is one of the great unsolved puzzles in science, not to mention philosophy, theology, jurisprudence and so on. The basic question is whether we are able to make decisions for ourselves or whether the outcomes are predetermined and the notion of choice is merely an illusion. Now a leading theoretical physicist has outlined a 'Turing Test' for free will and says that while simple devices such as thermostats cannot pass, more complex ones like iPhones might. The test is based on an extension of Turing's halting problem in computer science. This states that there is no general way of knowing how an algorithm will finish, other than to run it. This means that when a human has to make a decision, there is no way of knowing in advance how it will end up. In other words, the familiar feeling of not knowing the final decision until it is thought through is a necessary feature of the decision-making process and why we have the impression of free will. This leads to a simple set of questions that forms a kind of Turing test for free will. These show how simple decision-making devices such as thermostats cannot believe they have free will while humans can. A more interesting question relates to decision-makers of intermediate complexity, such as a smartphone. As the author puts it, this 'seems to possess all the criteria required for free will, and behaves as if it has it.'"
And Fire qualifies for many definitions of Life (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:And Fire qualifies for many definitions of Life (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Siri doesn't have free will (Score:4, Insightful)
But the people who programmed her do.
Prove it.
Re:Siri doesn't have free will (Score:5, Insightful)
But the people who programmed her do. She's just (well) designed to *appear* to have it.
But is there really any difference between having free will and appearing to have free will? Or, put another way, is there really any difference between the illusion of free will and free will? Is "free will" even a clearly defined concept? Some philosophers think not.
Re:And Fire qualifies for many definitions of Life (Score:5, Insightful)
For a definition of "life" to be meaningful, it needs to apply to bacteria, and not to fire, because the word has had meaning for a very long time, and it's meaning absolutely does not apply to fire.
I'm not trying to say that there aren't corner cases that are hard to define, but fire is not one of them, nor are bacteria.
Differentiating "just chemical reactions" from "life" is the purpose of said definition.
And yes, I am begging the question I suppose, but I will still stick by what I say.
There is no "unsolved problem of free will" (Score:5, Insightful)
First of all there really is no such thing as "free will", REGARDLESS of whether the universe is deterministic or not; the concept is by nature a contradiction. The generally accepted definition of free will is "I am the ultimate cause of my actions". To put it another way, "I am the ultimate originator of my will". If you are the religious type, then when you say "you", you're talking about some abstract notion of a soul, and we can't really delve any further. But this is a scientific paper, so "you" means the collection of thoughts, memories, and wills residing in your skull. So really we're saying "my will determines my will", which of course doesn't make sense! You couldn't have "chosen" your "original" will (which went on to determine your future wills); you weren't born yet! It is a prime example of causa sui.
But moving on to the paper, it's rife with invalid assumptions. For example: "If decisions are freely made, then those decisions can form the basis for condemning people to prison". That assumes that we condemn a person to prison because they made a bad decision and they "deserve it". That's an oversimplification. We condemn people to prison in order to dissuade other people from committing crimes, and to reduce the likelihood of condemned people committing more crimes. Free will and determinism have nothing to do with it.
Also, the paper never really attempts to form a test for free will. The poor summary is more to blame here than the paper itself. The paper forms a test for the PERCEPTION of free will, which the author arbitrarily defines as "being unable to know the result of a decision before actually making that decision" (which implies recursive reasoning, which is the main criteria for the test). So a thermostat does not have free will because an external device could easily predict its output. But a computer has the perception of free will, because as an extension to Turing's halting problem, it is possible to create algorithms where it is impossible to know the output faster than it takes to actually go through the algorithm.
What does this really mean, practically speaking? Absolutely nothing. These are concepts that have been discussed for many years; nothing is being added here. It's disappointing that this kind of thing is able to make it to the Slashdot front page.
Re:appearing to have free will (Score:5, Insightful)
With a human intelligence (HI), one cannot ever deconstruct why and how the system makes the decision that it makes. It is "random" in at least the sense of being unpredictable at countless levels involving the whole non-Markovian process of evolution from the very first cell through to the present organism making the decision. Worse, even the human itself doesn't know why it makes the decision it makes, not really. Chocolate or Vanilla ice cream today? "Chocolate because I like chocolate more than vanilla" is ultimately semantically null, because one cannot answer why one likes chocolate more than vanilla, and no matter what set of reasons one cooks up for it the ultimate answer is associated with a subjective response that is a sublime blend of (evolutionarily and experientially) preprogrammed stuff, experience, and the "mood of the moment", utterly unpredictable.
Unfortunately, these are [currently] unprovable assertions about a complex process that might turn out to be totally physical and explainable. "Chocolate stimulates the pleasure center of the brain more than vanilla due to a lifetime of changes in palette sensitivity" is a totally possible, non-mysterious answer. One could even imagine an advanced MRI showing the differences in neuron firing. But just because the process is so complex it can't be reverse-engineered, that doesn't mean it's random. Our lack of ability to predict it does not mean it's "unpredictable" in the mathematical sense.
Personally, I believe humans DO have free will - which I understand as the ability to choose an action contrary to the influence of instinct or conditioning. It may be difficult or impossible to know when this choice has been made, and it may be true that it's in fact rarely used, but it is an important philosophical distinction. I don't believe computers, as currently conceived as purely deterministic processors, are capable of free will. Even RNG don't change that - deterministically following a randomly-presented path is still deterministic. I do believe there is something "special" about humans in this regard - I don't think any animals currently have this ability (who knows about aliens - the universe is large).
As for religious implications, I see no conflict between the ideas that the capacity for free will is acquired by means of millennia of evolution of the brain, culminating in sufficient complexity for self-representation and consideration of alternative futures, granting non-deterministic ability; and "God made us that way." From my point of view, "intelligent design" and "natural evolution" are the same thing.
Re:Presence of self-awareness (Score:4, Insightful)
"It is important to note that satisifying the criteria for ass igning oneself free will does not imply that one possesses consciousness. Having the capacity for self-reference is a far cry from full self-consciousness."
Except that this is a bald statement, without anything to back it up, and which is very likely false.
There are other statements in the paper that I would consider grievous errors. For example, on p. 13, the author states:
"Installed in the computer or smart phone, the operating system is computationally universal and capable of fully recursive reasoning. (There is a subtlety here in that computational universality requires that you be able to add new memory to the computer or smart phone when it needs more â" for the moment letâ(TM)s assume that additional memory is at hand.) Consequently, the operating system can simulate other computers, smart phones, and Turing machines. It certainly possesses the capacity for self reference, as it has to allocate memory space and machine cycles for its own operation as well as for apps and calls."
Which I consider to be patently false. For one thing, he is crossing a rather serious boundary between computation and reasoning. He apparently considers them equal, which is a false premise to start with, and which makes shaky ground indeed on which to build the rest of his comment.
As Douglas Hofstadter demonstrates with thorough precision in his "Godel, Escher, Bach" book, it takes a minimum amount of complexity (far beyond anything we have built) in order to show any meaningful degree of self-reference. Your typical Turing machine has not, in fact, shown itself capable.
A Turing machine is a "complete" computational machine in that any calculation that can be done on one can be done on another. But nobody has ever discovered how to make them do the kind of things the author asserts.
The whole thing, to me, looks like yet another physicist / mathematician attempting to make the giant leap from physics to metaphysics, and falling face down in the gap between. Given the statements I have read in this paper, I simply cannot take it seriously.