Free will
in [Lisp]
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From: Don Geddis on 27 May 2010 13:04 Nick Keighley <nick_keighley_nospam(a)hotmail.com> wrote on Thu, 27 May 2010: > I think his problem is he doesn't consider something based on a > deterministic process to be *really* free will. If it's determined it > isn't free. I on the other hand have much more problem with a random > number generator as a source of freedom! Exactly. Surely our intuitions about free will are about deliberate choice, and responsibility, and those kinds of things. It seems odd to say, "well, there was a loaded gun on the table, and I was trying to decide whether to shoot my wife, and I wanted to be sure that I decided of my own free will rather than just the deterministic outcome of my biological brain, so I flipped a fair coin and it happened to come up tails, hence I shot and killed my wife." Really? Randomness helps with free will? And that's supposed to be somehow better than weighing the alternatives, and making a conscious choice to take the best action that is expected to maximize your goals? I don't get it. In truth, the answer is probably more like grasping at straws: if it seems intuitively to you that a deterministic machine can't possibly have free will, then you search for any possible escape hatch. Adding random numbers makes the algorithm non-deterministic, so maybe there's a way out with them! The exact details of how that accomplishes free will always seems to be an exercise left to the reader... -- Don _______________________________________________________________________________ Don Geddis http://don.geddis.org/ don(a)geddis.org 668: The Neighbor of the Beast
From: RG on 27 May 2010 13:36 In article <1jj5hmz.y920qf1ts5pjiN%wrf3(a)stablecross.com>, wrf3(a)stablecross.com (Bob Felts) wrote: > > > I never said that intelligence was a simple binary property. Are you > > > intelligent? Is Ron? > > > > Are those yes-or-no questions? > > > > For you and Ron, I would have thought yes. > > You're the fourth person I've asked this question, and I'm 4 for 4 on > not getting an answer. > (http://stablecross.com/files/category-dialogs.html) > > This is just absolutely fascinating. One would think that you wouldn't > hesitate a bit in answering "yes" to the question "are you intelligent?" And yet we do. So clearly your theory of how the world works needs revision. rg
From: Don Geddis on 27 May 2010 13:19 wrf3(a)stablecross.com (Bob Felts) wrote on Thu, 27 May 2010: > If I want to create an AI that mimics humans, I strongly suspect that > randomness will enter the picture. Would pseudo randomness be good enough, or do you need true (quantum) randomness? Why or why not? > I don't know any other way to implement imagination (which may be > solely to a lack of my own imagination) Really? I wonder what you think imagination is. Surely it's mostly about dreaming of possible (or impossible) worlds, that don't quite match reality. Such as: I see a river, that lots of people want to cross, and I imagine building a bridge across it. Now that I've imagined it, I can come up with a plan for assembling the materials and constructing the bridge. Once I have the plan, I can actually go out in the real world and execute that plan, and change the reality of the world to match my imagination. Was randomness required for that? > since the only tools I have to work with are determinism and > randomness. Determinism is sufficient to produce imagination. For that matter, even if you think you want randomness, pseudorandom algorithms (which really are, at root, deterministic) almost certainly get you what you need. True randomness is almost never a factor (except, for example, in cryptography). > Partly, because this quote from Knuth resonates with me: > | Many of today's best computational algorithms, like methods for > | searching the Internet, are based on randomization. But hardly ever, you should note, with a true quantum source of real randomness. > _Why_ don't you consider randomness free will? Because there's no sense of choice or responsibility with randomness, which intuitively seems like a criticial component of what people mean when they use the term "free will". -- Don _______________________________________________________________________________ Don Geddis http://don.geddis.org/ don(a)geddis.org If you're not part of the solution, then you're part of the precipitate.
From: Bob Felts on 27 May 2010 15:00 Don Geddis <don(a)geddis.org> wrote: > wrf3(a)stablecross.com (Bob Felts) wrote on Thu, 27 May 2010: > > If I want to create an AI that mimics humans, I strongly suspect that > > randomness will enter the picture. > > Would pseudo randomness be good enough, or do you need true (quantum) > randomness? Why or why not? > That's coming in my response to your other post. Which is giving me fits, and I don't want to rush it. > > I don't know any other way to implement imagination (which may be > > solely to a lack of my own imagination) > > Really? I wonder what you think imagination is. > > Surely it's mostly about dreaming of possible (or impossible) worlds, > that don't quite match reality. Matching reality has nothing to do with it, IMO. > Such as: I see a river, that lots of people want to cross, and I imagine > building a bridge across it. Now that I've imagined it, I can come up > with a plan for assembling the materials and constructing the bridge. > Once I have the plan, I can actually go out in the real world and execute > that plan, and change the reality of the world to match my imagination. > > Was randomness required for that? > You could have seen a river, or a starship, or a naked person of an appealing gender, or Cthulu, or pink unicorns, or flying monkeys, or intelligent shades of the color blue, or a naked Douglas Adams, painted blue, riding a pink unicorn, or... What provides that creative spark and (apparently limitless) state space? What determines what you imagine? [...] > > > _Why_ don't you consider randomness free will? > > Because there's no sense of choice or responsibility with randomness, > which intuitively seems like a criticial component of what people mean > when they use the term "free will". But there's likewise no sense of choice or responsibility with determinism. Off to a meeting.
From: RG on 27 May 2010 15:15
In article <1jj5o1o.zxe1og1o73kdaN%wrf3(a)stablecross.com>, wrf3(a)stablecross.com (Bob Felts) wrote: > What provides that creative spark and (apparently limitless) state > space? What determines what you imagine? It is instructive here to do some math. Suppose that the entire universe was a computer, with every subatomic particle being a computational element operating with a clock cycle of the Planck time. Let's assume infinitely fast communications and the entire lifetime of the universe with which to compute. Surely you would agree that the number of states that this computer can enumerate represents an upper bound on the number of states that would be needed to produce an "apparently limitless" state space, yes? So... 1. Within a few orders of magnitude, how many states can this computer enumerate? 2. How many bits are required to represent that many states? 3, How does that number compare with the number of bits that a human brain is capable of storing? 4. What does that tell you about the brain's capacity to imagine? Carrying out this exercise is left as, well, an exercise. But here's a hint: if you find yourself needing to use scientific notation to answer question #2 then you've made a mistake in your answer to question #1. rg |