Slashdot Mirror
Physicist Unveils a 'Turing Test' For Free Will
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.'"
So... she looks like a duck?
Wouldn't the presence of self-awareness be a prerequisite, so just about every device should fail, before even getting to the actual test?
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
"such as thermostats cannot believe they have free will while humans can."
Do thermostats really believe things?
The fact that a smartphone (Or I assume by extension any personal computer) can qualify should be an indcator that the test itself is flawed. Just like how many early definitions of Life applied to Fire (breaths, eats, grows, responds to outside stimuli, etc) even though it is just a chemical reaction.
Common Sense isn't as Common as people think...
My smartphone definitely has free will. I can not predict when it will reboot on its own, when it will freeze on a screen or when it will lie to me about notifications. I think it not only has free will, but is also a sociopath!
Karma: SELECT `karma` FROM `users` WHERE `userid`=138474;
oh, wow, you wouldn't BELIEVE the things some thermostats believe.
It's like giving Prak an overdose of truth serum and have him ramble on about frogs for sixty hours.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Does she float like a duck? No! She drops below the water and her vessel is destroyed. Thus, she is neither a witch, nor a duck.
Just because an entity's actions or decisions may be predictable does not mean that they have any less free will, it only means that previously identified habits or patterns have been identified which can be reasonably shown to influence the outcome.
If a small child puts their hand on a hot stove for the first time and they get burned, the fact that they aren't liable to do that again is fairly easy to predict, but isn't remotely an indication that some of their free will has been taken from them. If anything, the fact that they are not consciously making the specific choice to avoid their own discomfort in the future only affirms their free will, even though this is an expected and predictable response.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
But the people who programmed her do.
Prove it.
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.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
Does a random number generator have free will?
What if someone gave you absolutely irrefutable proof that there's no such thing as free will, but you chose not to believe it?
1. It’s your birthday. Someone gives you a calfskin wallet. How do you react?
2. You've got a little boy. He shows you his butterfly collection plus the killing jar. What do you do?
3. You’re watching television. Suddenly you realize there’s a wasp crawling on your arm.
4. You’re in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise, Tony, it’s crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back, Tony. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t, not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that?
5. Describe in single words, only the good things that come into your mind about your mother.
But perhaps she floats like a piece of wood. In which case she may be burnt. BURN HER!!!
From Time Bandits:
Kevin: Yes, why does there have to be evil?
Supreme Being: I think it has something to do with free will.
Yet the questions in the article didn't seem to cover the subject of "evil". Can a phone with supposed free will do evil, or is it just infected with a bug or virus? Here's Jessica Rabbit's take:
I'm not bad. I'm just drawn that way.
Like many cartoon characters, Jessica evidently is sentient, yet she lacks free will. Silly wabbit.
Again, someone ran into the halting problem and thought they could say something profound about it. Worse, they got tangled up with "free will", which is theology, not physics or compute science.
A deterministic machine with finite memory must either repeat a state or halt. The halting problem applies only to infinite-memory machines. A halting problem for a finite program can be made very hard, even arbitrarily hard, but not infinitely hard.
As a practical matter, there's a widely used program that tries to solve the halting problem by formal means - the Microsoft Static Driver Verifier. Every signed driver for Windows 7 and later has been through that verifier, which attempts to formally prove that the driver will not infinitely loop, break the system memory model with a bad pointer, or incorrectly call a driver-level API. In other words, it is trying to prove that the driver won't screw up the rest of the OS kernel. This is a real proof of correctness system in widespread use.
The verifier reports Pass, Fail, or Inconclusive. Inconclusive is reported if the verifier runs out of time or memory space. That's usually an indication that the driver's logic is a mess. If you're getting close to undecidability in a device driver, it's not a good thing.
If it turns out we don't have free will, I plan to go nuts and just do whatever I want!
Dark Reflection
Well, that wouldn't really be his choice, now would it?
My suspicion on the answer to this question, for people, depends entirely on what the actions being judged are. For example, "Your Honor, my client cannot be held responsible for his crimes, because he has no free will." "Why of course, honey, I picked out those flowers especially because I thought you might like them."
Be careful when discussing this topic, because you may be booked for arguing with the referee
I am officially gone from
Whatever the heuristics are between the "beings", the act of decision is the same. And that's why it's not a magical "human right of free will". AI Free Will is a snap. We're just desperately afraid of it. See T2, "If the wrong heuristic gets in there..." - well that's what sociopathic killers are. Humans running a badly flawed HumanOS.
Well, there is one small difference. With an AI, one can always, precisely, deconstruct why and how the system makes the decision that it makes, unless it uses truly random sources to distribute choices over some space at some point. Heinlein recognized the importance of unpredictability in free will long, long before the top article, and his AIs always had lots of random number generators built in even though he couldn't precisely articulate why. Random number generators of course, are not random at all, so one has to resort to quantum sources or entropic sources where one is truly missing the information needed to predict the decision and where there is a probability that, given precisely the same initial conditions, they AI would decide differently.
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.
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
or as they say — never mistake motion for action. :-^
My phone will never be a "decider."
I control the phone. It goes in the trash if it disobeys me. Can a phone make a decision about whether it goes in the trash? No?
(...then it is not a "decider")
So when your Windows 8 phone updated itself automatically, and stopped working, was that a choice of yours, or did your phone valiantly decide to take its own life rather than be a slave to (insert name of CEO here)?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
And in the same sense, does a married man have free will? At first it might appear so, but upon further investigation it is clear that he does not.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
An abbott in "A Canticle for Leibowitz" had a balky piece of high technology in his office and shouted something to the effect "It has a soul, I tell you! It knows the difference between good and evil and it has chosen evil!".
The very concept of free will is itself a silly one, devised by simple-minded people. And it has absolutely NOTHING to do with science.
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.
Humans don't have free will. There's no reason to believe the answer to question #4 is no. The neurons composing our brain deterministically (given a specieid set of stimuli, they had a calculatable response). With sufficient knowledge on the layout and state of someone's brain, you could calculate what their response to a given stimuli would be.
Q1: Am I a decider?
Q2: Do I make my decisions using recursive reasoning (ie using a process that can be simulated on a digital computer)?
Q3: Can I model and simulate—at least partially—my own behaviour and that of other deciders?
Q4: Can I predict my own decisions beforehand?
“If you answered Yes to questions 1 to 3, and you answer Yes to question 4, then you are lying. If you answer Yes to questions 1,2,3, and No to question 4, then you are likely to believe that you have free will,” says Lloyd.
Answering those questions myself, I consider myself to be a decider (as in, I make decisions), I can model/simulate my and others' actions (I pride myself on it), and I can predict my own decisions (because I can model/simulate them). So I'm lying. But where is the lie? Am I misinterpreting the term "decider"?
No, you're misinterpreting their usage of "predict". They were careful to use model and simulate in Q3 but predict in Q4. The point is that you cannot "predict" your decision, you can only make your decision. If you could build a computer system capable of predicting your decision before you made it, you would quickly realize you do not have free will, because every decision you make would have been predicted by your computer system.
And then there's the question of having free will. I have the freedom to modify my thinking processes at any time should I not like a decision I have arrived at. Thus I have free will - at least I consider it to be - yet I would answer "yes" to all four questions.
The point is that if you answered yes to the first three questions, then you only perceive yourself as having the freedom to modify your thinking process at any time (i.e. free will).
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.
my, your, his/her/its, our, your, their
I'm, you're, he's/she's/it's, we're, you're, they're
"But is there really any difference between having free will and appearing to have free will?
Yes.
Or, put another way, is there really any difference between the illusion of free will and free will?
Still 'Yes'.
Congratulations. You've discovered the most obvious limit of behavioralism.
I think I am in the camp of
... not having a basic understanding of modern philosophy?
Required reading for internet skeptics
This rock on my desk can't predict it's behaviour at all. It sounds like it passes with flying colours.
On the other hand, I can predict it's behaviour quite accurately.
Do the programmers actually have free will, or is it just the Toxoplasma parasites in their brains?
No, it's not. The whole question is mis-asked. Raymond Smullyan's piece Is God A Taoist? has the best explanation I've seen:
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
... not having a basic understanding of modern philosophy?
Its been awhile since I was in school (for philosophy), or reading up on the current discussion, but as far as I know this is still a massive debate, with very little, if any, agreement between philosophers (or psychologists, or neurologists, or cognitive scientists, or programmers, or physicists, or whoever else's feild this topic touches).
That said, there is a large debate on whether there is a difference between agency as a thing, and the perception of agency. Go read up on Searle's Chinese Room, and the debate it has sparked (especially Dennett). Also read up on the whole thought-experiment of "p-zombies", which explores this very concept.
AFAICT there isn't a consensus on this topic at all.
I take a more existential stance on it; where it doesn't really matter since one can't live as if one doesn't have agency, so on a human level the debate doesn't matter either way, since agency is a necessary trait to existence.
Ontically, though, I'm pretty sure agency is a dead horse unless we find something wrong with modern science. You can stretch things a bit (ala Dennett, again) by tying agency into the quantum realm, but you really just push the debate back a bit; is random, yet probabilistic, much better than classically deterministic? Neither leave room for an actual "you" driving you, barring theology and a Cartesian bag of worms. If humans are purely matter, and that matter follows the same laws as all other matter then agency is impossible. If we have something immune from the normal laws of physics, then how are we to ever prove this fact, and further how does this "spiritual matter" (or whatever) influence "actual matter"?
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
To those who say they have no free will: "If you have no free will then you are a machine. Beware, it is easier to justify discarding/destroying/retask a machine that no longer 'meets the specifications'".
As for the question we don't even have proof that the physicist's definition of free will is correct, much less the OPs. The physicist is assuming free will = not knowing the final decision. But that's ridiculous! He hasn't even explained Consciousness - which is the "knowing" phenomena of how "we know we know". If there's no "you" observing yourself, there's no "you" deciding what happens next, thus there's no free will - since there's no Entity to _will_ anything in the first place whether free or not!
If he can figure out how the "knowing"/Consciousness phenomena works than he is in a better position to decide whether something has free will or not. Otherwise he's being silly and talking about stuff that he should do more thinking about first.
We think we have free will because we are self aware. Not because we don't know what we will ultimately decide to do. Sometimes we know exactly what we will decide to do next and yet our sense of "free will" does not go away. If I put you in a cage, you still believe you have free will, you just don't have the freedom to exercise your free will. That cage could be physical or metaphorical (e.g. limited choices).
And the jury will have no choice but to send you to jail.
So you think we have something special that makes us more complex than, say, a dog or a cat? Many animals have been shown to have abstract thought abilities, and we just thought they are less intelligent (in the sense of the ability of reasoning, not if they can remember more things, or calculate faster), actually just did not have the need to evolve a complex spoken language to help them represent those abstract thoughts.
Dogs are able to understand human gestures, and can understand certain words/phrases. That implies communication skills that many animals don't have. Then they understand those messages, and act upon them. You could say they do so because they want to. How are your choices free will but not theirs?
A cat knows it needs to open a door to reach its food. When it wants food, it might come to you for help, or it may try to open the door on its own. Regardless of which action it takes, the cat made a decision, and chose a way to act. It could have chosen otherwise, but it did not. How is that different than your free will?
If the question boils down to whether a person is a deterministic system or not, even that is an open question. Perhaps people and animals are too random to be called properly deterministic. Neurons are and other cells are highly nonlinear analog systems that be subject to macroscopic effects based on quantum noise. If that is the case it may be possible to duplicate a human being in principle -- down to the level of the quantum state of each constituent particle, but still not be possible in principle to build a system that will duplicate her behavior. On the other hand, the systems we are built of could be fundamentally stable, or multistable at some levels of approximation and it may therefore be possible to model us accurately with simpler systems such as computers. Or it may be that while our neurons are crude hacks that exhibit all kinds of complex, impossible to model behavior, at a higher level we are mulitistable and thus susceptible to accurate modeling.
The point you make about AIs being built with random elements to model the random shit that happens in our brains is an interesting one. I doubt scientists at this point could come to a consensus about whether that is somehow important to intelligence in living systems and I also doubt that philosophers could come to a consensus about whether randomness is essential to free will.
I'd say at this point, we are making faster progress on building more and more intelligent systems. There probably won't be a bright line we will cross and then everybody will say computers are people too. It's more likely there will be progress on multiple fronts as there has been in the past, and AIs will outperform people in some respects while remaining more limited than people in other areas for some time yet. But at some point, if progress maintains, AIs will be as good or better at everything than people are and we will have no excuse to not consider them our equals. And the question will be as relevant a question whether they have free will as it is whether we have free will.
I think that time is coming much sooner than the time at which we will fully understand how our own brains work, let alone be able to build a system that does the same thing.