Sure, today's AI machines can have a version of 'free will' or some sort of own volition (more metaphysically neutral term). One crashed into a tree in Canada. I'm pretty sure the designers didn't program that into it's behavior patterns but maybe it was predetermined that car would crash into that tree on that day in Canada during the big-bang.

https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.130.9091&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Volition, like intelligence, is a concept of interest and utility to both philosophers and researchers in artificial intelligence. Unfortunately, it is often poorly defined, potentially difficult to assess in biological and artificial systems, and its usage recalls the ancient, futile debate of free will vs. determinism. This paper proposes to define volition, and to suggest a functionally-defined, physically-grounded ordinal scale and a procedure by which volition might be measured: a kind of Turing test for volition, but motivated by an explicit analysis of the concept being tested and providing results which are graded, rather than Boolean, so that candidate systems may be ranked according to their degree of volitional endowment. Volition is proposed to be a functional, aggregate property of certain physical systems and is defined as the capacity for adaptive decision-making.

This paper argues that volition is a useful concept to analyze and measure in systems because it may suggest both a set of distinct architectural features and a plan of attack for researchers who are trying to understand the mechanisms of motivated human behavior. Setting a single criterion for volition in the manner of Turing’s original test may be useful, but it is a blunt instrument of analysis. What both cognitive scientists and AI researchers are most concerned with are the mechanisms of willful, intelligent behavior: the architectural features and subsystems that allow the complex phenomena of volition, intelligence, and consciousness to be manifest in physical systems. Volition, like intelligence and consciousness, seems to be possessed in different degrees by organisms, and the difference of degree may be best explained by which functional and neural architectural features the organisms possess or lack. More primitive animals will possess the most basic of these features, whereas more complex and flexibly-behaving animals such as primates and humans will possess the more advanced features.

 

Okay, now I understand why you would disagree that free will is incompatible with physics. But I don’t think that is what Sabine means by free will.

Bob

 

Okay, now I understand why you would disagree that free will is incompatible with physics. But I don’t think that is what people mean by free will.

Bob

People? Ask the meth addict what is 'free will'? Definitions of free will can vary wildly. Physics is a priesthood, it's not all people. That free will is incompatible with physics is the mantra of a priesthood that IMO most physics followers say because it's in the doctrine. They don't follow the "no free will' mantra with each other, in their science (experiments matter, it's not all predetermined), with their families ('bad' decision have consequences) or with society in general.

 

I agree that “people” was the wrong word. Before I saw your post I edited mine to change it to “Sabine”.

Bob

 

I agree that “people” was the wrong word. Before I saw your post I edited mine to change it to “Sabine”.

Bob

There were a few in science that actually practiced 'no free will' like B. F. Skinner at the behavioural level. I read some his books when I was a lot younger, depressing stuff IMO.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_Freedom_and_Dignity

 

As do you apparently.

Let me ask you a simple question. What does “I” mean in your post?

I don't believe I can easily tackle philosophy, but after reading multiple books and essays on the topic, I believe that anyone who believes in free will is either making a supernatural claim, which is exactly what Sabiine is saying when she claims it is incompatible with physics, or is saying that we have a decision making process that cannot be fully predicted or comprehended which could apply equally to a sohisticated enough machine, which, oddly enough, is what I am saying when I say I do not believe in free will.

Bob

What does "I" mean in my post? ... good question. What does "I" mean to anybody?. Science, so far, has been unable to provide an answer. Philosophy has gotten closer, though.

There are various rather interesting studies out there venturing in the currently young field of the study of consciousness. And so far, everything, and I mean absolutely everything, falls into the realm of speculation and hypothesis. It's a start, yes. But it's light years away of yielding consistent answers to the mystery of "I think, therefore I exist". I think that the free will conundrum will be solved when consciousness itself is solved. But perhaps both fields fall into Gödel's incompleteness theorem.

What I believe is that consciousness and free will are entangled and cannot be separated. You can't have consciousness without free will and vice versa. That's why I believe that animals (at least the least developed ones) are not self aware beyond the primitive functions of survival and reproduction, and therefore have no free will, at least not the way humans do .... can an organism have "a little" free will instead? ... I honestly don't know.

Also, I'm religious. But I don't think that free will and the supernatural are necessarily connected. The truth is that we do not yet know all there is to know about the physical laws of the universe and existence itself. There are many anomalies out there that are yet to be explained... that's an undeniable truth.

 

I believe my cat has more free will than I do.

Bob

 

Cats have nine times more free will than we do, my friend...

 

From said article:



How can "I" (this mass of neurons) make "bad decisions" if I have no free will? ... without free will I have no choice, and therefore everything I do is the result of pre-set physical and chemical reactions. I'm just another ball in a game of pool having zillions of other balls bouncing around.... in simple words, the capacity of making a choice (or a decision) simply does not exist in a universe in which free will does not exist either.

Miss Hossenfelder is one of the smartest people in the net ... but this time I can't help but disagree with her... funny how many scientists out there think that they can easily tackle philosophy

I think that there is only one true philosophy, and that is that there is no absolute philosophy or else it would just be just called fact. So you could be right, and possibly so because of something they call "emergence" as it pertains to philosophy. Of course many philosophers try to push their own version of fact.
I like to say sometimes, "Your facts are not my facts", and that is not a mockery of anyone's facts, it's just that perhaps i have not experienced the same things as that person did and so i have a completely different viewpoint. Also, it is known now and i think since the days of Aristotle that the whole is not always due to the sum of the individual parts.

 

As do you apparently.

Let me ask you a simple question. What does “I” mean in your post?

I don't believe I can easily tackle philosophy, but after reading multiple books and essays on the topic, I believe that anyone who believes in free will is either making a supernatural claim, which is exactly what Sabiine is saying when she claims it is incompatible with physics, or is saying that we have a decision making process that cannot be fully predicted or comprehended which could apply equally to a sohisticated enough machine, which, oddly enough, is what I am saying when I say I do not believe in free will.

Bob

Everyone has their own philosophy, so is there any true philosophy?

Also, just because we know how parts of a system work does not necessarily mean we know how the whole works. Emergence as it pertains to philosophy has a lot to say about that.
For example, start with the single digit numbers 0 through 9. Try to write down a set like so:
3,6,2,9 or 4,8,2,2,1,0, etc., and see how many numbers you can write down before a pattern emerges even though your goal is to prevent such a pattern from emerging.

But unfortunately i think people can argue over what is real and what isnt indefinitely because it seems that there is a relational operator that has to be considered, which may be considered another dimension, and when you introduce another dimension into a problem you effectively end up with multiple copies of the original although each one could be slightly different.
For example, the one i like to quote a lot, is a hole, such as a hole in the ground. Is a hole real or not?
To some people a hole is real because if they step in it they could trip for example, but in other cases the lack of material that "makes up" the hole is not really anything phyiscal it's the property of the lack of material, the borders, which are physical.

 

The whole question is ill-defined. Free-will and pre-destiny are indistinguishable in the realm of physics. Just as you can never say with for certain whether you are coasting along through space at a constant velocity or simply at rest likewise one can never know with absolute certainty whether some event was guided by a "hidden" force or not. It's the Equivalence Principle of Indifference. If such things cannot be MEASURED then both interpretations must be equally valid as far as we are concerned.

 

If such things cannot be MEASURED then both interpretations must be equally valid as far as we are concerned.

That is true, from an objective and neutral perspective. That is why in my previous post I made emphasis on the use of the phrase "I believe". My goal was to ascertain that I consider myself 100% responsible (within my human limits) of my own acts and choices, and never lie to myself blaming "the universe" or other forces for my own mistakes or wrongful decisions.

 

That is true, from an objective and neutral perspective. That is why in my previous post I made emphasis on the use of the phrase "I believe". My goal was to ascertain that I consider myself 100% responsible (within my human limits) of my own acts and choices, and never lie to myself blaming "the universe" or other forces for my own mistakes or wrongful decisions.

Good point. And also true, the interpretation itself is so often used as a scapegoat for bad behaviour. The takeaway there being that ANY philosophical position for that matter which violates good sense should be IMMEDIATELY discarded!

 

That is true, from an objective and neutral perspective. That is why in my previous post I made emphasis on the use of the phrase "I believe". My goal was to ascertain that I consider myself 100% responsible (within my human limits) of my own acts and choices, and never lie to myself blaming "the universe" or other forces for my own mistakes or wrongful decisions.

That's an interesting view. Guy goes to court for robbing a bank, says, "Sorry your honor but the universe made be do it".