On free will

I just read the first few chapter in Sam Harris excellent Free Will. He is of course correct. Free will is (almost certainly) an illusion.

However. He is sort of pointing to something in the book which I have been thinking about before and which is more or less captured by the Turing test. A device has free will if its actions cannot be foreseen and they are known to be at least partially causal.

This connects to a formulation I made a long time ago about free will. A system has free will if it is by it self sufficient to determine some action outcome given some stimulus. This is an attempt to differentiate it from stochastic and deterministic systems. In this sense, a system possessing memory or hysteresis has free will.