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.'"

Comments

Presence of self-awareness

[TWX]

Wouldn't the presence of self-awareness be a prerequisite, so just about every device should fail, before even getting to the actual test?

Re:Presence of self-awareness

[Jane Q. Public]

"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.

And Fire qualifies for many definitions of Life

[Quantus347]

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.

Re:And Fire qualifies for many definitions of Life

[AvitarX]

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.

Re:And Fire qualifies for many definitions of Life

[gameboyhippo]

Depends on who you ask. Some people would not necessarily believe that he or she is 'just a chemical reaction'. As unhip as it is, I really don't think I'm 'just a chemical reaction'. I have will. I don't know about the rest of the world, but I know I have a will. Now when you come back and start flaming me for believing what is known as a properly basic belief (that I am real), just keep in mind that you're not real and therefore your arguments to the contrary matters about as much as cleverbot's.

I think the big problem with believing that people are real is that it feels supernatural. And since arm chair scientists are allergic to the idea that there exists a nature outside of our nature (that is a super nature or supernatural - not to be confused with magic), they will go through gyrations to deny such an obvious truth as in that 'I am real'.

Now cleverbots, bring on the pitchforks. Be sure to downvote this to (Score:-1 Probably a Christian) if you have mod points.

My phone has free will

[SeanTobin]

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!

Re:My phone has free will

[ImprovOmega]

Don't forget the random auto-"corrections" that it makes to what you type. Sometimes I think my phone is trying to get me killed...

[Text to Wife] Honey I'll be picking up some (chicken) chicks to eat tonight. See you at (home) hate you (gorgeous) gordo lady! P.S. (Veronica) Erotica at work was crazy today, tell you all about it later.

mostly global warming lies...

[Thud457]

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.

Re:Hmm

[xevioso]

My thermostat believes it's Napoleon, and whenever I wander by it on the way to the restroom at night, it always bugs me about how we should be invading Russia and to please make sure I never ship him off to Elba or some such nonsense.

Re:Siri doesn't have free will

[Anonymous Coward]

But the people who programmed her do.

Prove it.

Re:Siri doesn't have free will

[BitterOak]

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:Siri doesn't have free will

[CapOblivious2010]

What if someone gave you absolutely irrefutable proof that there's no such thing as free will, but you chose not to believe it?

Actual Questions HERE!

[mythosaz]

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.

Re:Siri doesn't have free will

[xevioso]

But perhaps she floats like a piece of wood. In which case she may be burnt. BURN HER!!!

Oh, not again.

[Animats]

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.

Re:Siri doesn't have free will

[OakDragon]

If it turns out we don't have free will, I plan to go nuts and just do whatever I want!

Re:Siri doesn't have free will

[pspahn]

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.

Re:Hmm

[houghi]

My thermostat believes it's Napoleon

A pity many others don't and therefore don't measure in Celsius.

There is no "unsolved problem of free will"

[harvestsun]

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.

According to this test..

[Stormy Dragon]

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.

Re:appearing to have free will

[almitydave]

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:Siri doesn't have free will

[ceoyoyo]

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.

Re:Siri doesn't have free will

[Mr. Slippery]

Is "free will" even a clearly defined concept?

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:

Mortal:
What do you mean that I cannot conflict with nature? Suppose I were to become very stubborn, and I determined not to obey the laws of nature. What could stop me? If I became sufficiently stubborn even you could not stop me!

God:
You are absolutely right! I certainly could not stop you. Nothing could stop you. But there is no need to stop you, because you could not even start! As Goethe very beautifully expressed it, "In trying to oppose Nature, we are, in the very process of doing so, acting according to the laws of nature!" Don't you see that the so-called "laws of nature" are nothing more than a description of how in fact you and other beings do act? They are merely a description of how you act, not a prescription of of how you should act, not a power or force which compels or determines your acts. To be valid a law of nature must take into account how in fact you do act, or, if you like, how you choose to act.

Mortal:
So you really claim that I am incapable of determining to act against natural law?

God:
It is interesting that you have twice now used the phrase "determined to act" instead of "chosen to act." This identification is quite common. Often one uses the statement "I am determined to do this" synonymously with "I have chosen to do this." This very psychological identification should reveal that determinism and choice are much closer than they might appear. Of course, you might well say that the doctrine of free will says that it is you who are doing the determining, whereas the doctrine of determinism appears to say that your acts are determined by something apparently outside you. But the confusion is largely caused by your bifurcation of reality into the "you" and the "not you." Really now, just where do you leave off and the rest of the universe begin? Or where does the rest of the universe leave off and you begin? Once you can see the so-called "you" and the so-called "nature" as a continuous whole, then you can never again be bothered by such questions as whether it is you who are controlling nature or nature who is controlling you. Thus the muddle of free will versus determinism will vanish. If I may use a crude analogy, imagine two bodies moving toward each other by virtue of gravitational attraction. Each body, if sentient, might wonder whether it is he or the other fellow who is exerting the "force." In a way it is both, in a way it is neither. It is best to say that it is the configuration of the two which is crucial.