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.

A proposition on (free) will

I have a proposition on what might constitute (what might appear as free) will. It is a complex set of "high order" rules where by an entity operate or which govern the entity's operation.
This is an intuitive definition of will in the sense that people tend to use the word in contexts which apply to the above definition. It is most clear with computer programs where people can talk about the computers "will" when it does something (it should not). But it can also be seen e.g. when animals or plants are discussed: "The flower wants to have much sun", or rain. Or "the moskito wants to suck blood".

Now, I would like to propose that we should look for these high order rules and see if they can be built in to a program to emulate will.

These higher order rules can probably be associated to different orders of logic or Russells type theory.

Another key aspect of these rules is that they should have a connection to senses and actuators. That is key for interaction.

This might be a bit behavioristic. But one can view mind as an hirarcical entity consisting of entities which can be probed from the outside, but when viewed internally no mind process can be found. The entities them selves consist of further new entities which cannot internally be associated to a cognitive process bytes can perform one as a whole. This is some kind of emerging phenomenon model. Ideas similar to these, but expressed differently were also presented here.

Why is God all mighty?

I just read an intriguing paper which discussed weather the Internet might become conscious. In connection to this it occurred to me that in the discussions about AI developing consciousness (C) and free will (FW) there are many people that point out that this emerging CFW might pose a danger to us humans. Embedded in the reasoning is usually an assumption that the CFW will be superior us, due to many different reasons.
Now. For this CFW, we are the creator. Maybe we could be considered Gods. On the other hand, our creation supersedes us. Can this be the case also with the humans - we supersede our creator. It is an interesting thought and actually compatible, I think, with standard physical models of the universe creation. However not quite compatible with the Christian God I guess.

On free will

There is an exciting talk by Daniel Dennet about free will. His take is a very interesting one, being a compatibilist. But I would like to take another stab at this case. Not that I know much of it, I must admit. But of course it is one of the tricky ones. So, my take, here goes.

I think one should be able to give a more detailed account for what free will is than with guys like Daniel Dennet is doing. The problem is that there is a quite large gap between discussing determinism and free will. Determinism can be described like
F = m a
or is many other ways ans mathematically well formed laws. This is not a consequence of determinism. It is determinism, and it is how we can understand it.
At the other end of the spectrum, there is randomness. This is just as nice as determinism. It can be described using pure mathematics. We can say that the random variable X obeys the distribution A(P₁, P₂, ..., P_n), where the P's are parameters.
Now, the problem is that non of these descriptions fit free will, and at the same time it seem free will is something similar to these concepts. Could it be that one can define free will as: An entity has free will if, via communication, it can be made to obey either a deterministic law or any stochastic. Thus, my definition require that the entity can communicate some way.

Anyway, back to work. Let's elaborate more on this later.