Facing the Quasi-Autonomous Robot Monsters Under The Bed, Part II

(Read Part I)

In the following, G precedes each of Geoffrey's questions/statements, and A precedes each of my responses.

A: The "Free Will" debate has been raging for years and years and years, and has consumed innumerable forests of paper, gallons upon gallons of ink, and petabytes of server space already. Hence, I don't see it as realistic to presume it can be resolved here in the comments to a blog post.

Furthermore, I try not to get involved in large-scale Free Will Debates very often because it's so easy for them to turn into huge time-sucking black holes of endless argumentation with people who are convinced beyond any shadow of a doubt that they are right and that everyone who doesn't agree with them is either ignorant of the Divine Truth or suffering from a terminal case of wishful thinking. My comments here by no means reflect a fixed, firm position, anyway, and shouldn't be taken to do so. They're just an exploration of the subject given what I think I understand right now. I might change my mind (or be "compelled" to do so) at some point; this doesn't concern me too much, seeing as I'm not a politician.

Geoffrey's definition of free will was stated as follows: Free will is defined as the power of the will to determine itself and to act of itself, without compulsion from within or coercion from without.

In the purely practical sense, I would agree with this definition -- that is, I agree with it based on the way I usually define "compulsion" and "coercion".

I see "compulsion" as describing an action that is either:

(a) totally involuntary (like a heartbeat or hiccup),

or,

(b) the result of a person's having a very, very strong need to do something to the point where not doing it takes more energy than doing it (like biting your nails out of habit, which "feels" very different internally from deciding to bite your nails because they're too long for your liking and you don't have a nail clipper handy).

Some particular kinds of determinists might consider anything a person does to be a "compulsion", but I don't find this viewpoint very useful for thinking about how minds actually operate.

I see "coercion" as describing a state in which one agent acts in such a way that another agent is restricted in some particular way as a result of the desires and resultant actions of the first agent. It's probably easiest to explain this by way of example: e.g., if someone puts a gun to your head and says, "Give me all your money!", your giving them the money would not represent a freely chosen action on your part, but rather, a coerced one. However, if a friend came up to you and asked to borrow a dollar (without threatening you or trying to trick you in the process), your giving a dollar to your friend would not be a coerced action, but a freely chosen one.

"Choice" in this sense doesn't violate causality, either -- in some respects I think "choice" is what we end up with when the chain of causality leading up to an event is sufficiently complex and not directly reducible to the imposition of one person's (or group's) will on another. The more subtle, low-level influences between a choice presenting itself and a person making a choice, the more of a "true choice" that choice is. In the second example above, your choice was caused by things like your desire to make your friend happy, your perception of your friend's need for a dollar, the fact that you had a dollar to give in the first place, what kind of mood you happened to be in that day, whether you'd eaten breakfast or not...etc., etc., But it was not caused by some direct and immediate threat or manipulation on the part of your friend, and that made it noncoerced.

I guess...in simple terms, I see "free will" as being something that is real in every meaningful sense in this universe, but that need not contradict causality. Obviously, some things cause other things to happen, and I don't see why human (and other) brains should be assumed totally divorced and disconnected from the rest of material reality.

G:It is the faculty of an intelligent being to act or not act, to act this way or another way, and is therefore essentially different from the operations of irrational beings that merely respond to a stimulus and are conditioned by sensory objects. However, how could we determine if a robot had these qualities? I know you said you didn't really want to debate whether we can "manufacture" consciousness, but I'm not sure how this topic can be avoided.

A: The question of whether or not we can or cannot (ever) "manufacture" consciousness is unanswerable per current neurological and cognitive science. We know that our brains are capable of producing the experience of being conscious, but we don't know exactly why or how. Yes, a lot of people have theories, and yes, some of those theories seem to be yielding interesting experimental results, but something tells me I'd have heard about it if some scientist somewhere had discovered the Ultimate True Theory of Consciousness.

I think that in order to really and truly gauge whether a robot had the "qualities of consciousness" indicated in Geoffrey's comment above, we'd need to come up with a way to empirically measure conscious awareness. Obviously we don't have anything like this yet -- sure, we have some guesses related to certain brainwave patterns, but since different brainwave patterns can indicate different things in different people, even that isn't conclusive.

Trust me, if I knew how to invent a device that would allow objective measurement of consciousness, I'd probably be a research scientist getting approved for huge grants rather than a humble blogger with a day job as an electrical engineer.

That said, all we can do in the absence of such a device (in my opinion) is come to terms with the fact that we don't yet know exactly how to detect and evaluate someone else's conscious awareness. While I look forward to seeing what the ongoing research in this area yields over the next few decades, obviously decisions are going to have to be made in the meantime. From an ethical standpoint, I advocate a bias toward presuming self-awareness, though I don't think self-awareness must be presumed in everything -- it's something that needs to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. I personally presume self-awareness in all living animals save for creatures like bacteria and yeast -- not human-like self-awareness, but some form of it nonetheless.

I can't even begin to imagine what it's like to be a moth, but I still think there must be something to the experience of being a moth. And, I'd wager, there might very well be something to being a robot. Not a robot that's already been invented, but a robot that might exist someday. Who knows?

I'm not nearly as well-read in fields like cognition, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence as I'd like to be, and maybe I'll be able to offer a more informed opinion once I have more information on which to base such an opinion. Besides, I'm not trying to make any claims anywhere on this blog that are somehow dependent upon the notion of manufacturable consciousness being provably plausible.