Ben,
Yes, I'll match my understanding and knowledge of, and ideas on, the free
will issue against anyone's.
For example - and this is the real issue that concerns YOU and AGI - I
just introduced an entirely new dimension to the free will debate. You
literally won't find it anywhere. Including Dennett. Free thinking. If we
are free to decide, then it follows we are also free to think - not merely
to decide either way at the end of solving a problem, but free as to how we
go about solving that problem - free to spend a little more time or less
time on it, free to ask someone else's opinion or go with our gut instinct,
free to list the pro's and cons or to take the first reasonable idea that
comes along, free to attack it logically/algebraically or verbally etc.
etc.
That is an extremely important dimension of free will. It simply hasn't
been considered. Clearly it should be.
For the purposes of AGI, you can put the free will issue to one side, at
least for a while, I would suggest, and concentrate on freedom of thought.
You see, it is absolutely fundamental to robotics to describe robots in
terms of degrees of freedom - of movement, (whatever your views on free
will)..It is, or will be, similarly fundamental to AGI to describe
autonomous computational minds in terms of degrees of freedom - of thought.
There is a crashingly obvious difference between a rational computer and a
human mind - and the only way cognitive science has managed not to see it
is by resolutely refusing to look at it, just as it resolutely refused to
look at the conscious mind in the first place. The normal computer has no
problems concentrating. Give it a problem and it will proceed to produce a
perfect rational train of thought, with every step taken, and not a single
step missed. (Or to put that another way - it has zero freedom of thought).
But human minds have major problems concentrating. Literally for more than
seconds on end. For a human mind to produce a rational reflective train of
thought for something like a minute is virtually impossible. Obviously this
varies according to the problem/ subject, but the basic problem of
concentration is acknowledged by a whole variety of psychologists from
Williiam James to Cszikszentmilhalyi - and undeniable.
Look at how human minds actually approach problems - their literal streams
of thought (something cognitive psychology still almost totally refuses to
do) - and you will find that humans can and do miss out at different times
each and every step of what might be considered a rational train of thought
- they don't listen to, or set the question/problem, don't look at the
evidence or look at irrelevant things, don't even try to have ideas, are
biassed, don't think for themselves but copy others' ideas, lose the thread,
go off at tangents, repeat themelves, are uncritical, don't check etc etc.
In innumerable ways, we almost always jump to conclusions and leave out
ideal steps of reasoning. We are incapable of producing extended rational
trains of thought and movement. (Just look at student essays, right?) We may
be fairly effective reasoners, all things considered, but by the reasoning
standards of rational computers we are irrational, period.
Now to the rational philosopher and scientist and to the classical AI
person, this is all terrible (as well as flatly contradicting one of the
most fundamental assumptions of cognitive science, i.e. that humans think
rationally). We are indeed "only human not [rational, deterministic]
machines."
But I would expect someone who cares about AGI to understand that this
is also all beautiful. Our extreme capacity for error can also be described
as extreme freedom of thought- and the basis of our adaptivity. Every
error in one context is an adaptive advantage in another. It's good and
vital in all kinds of situations to be able to jump to conclusions, for
example. It's good and vital to be able to completely restructure the ways
you think about a problem.
I would expect you and Pei to be deeply interested in that whole dimension
of freedom of thought (and also to see that it provides a functional
distinction between the conscious and unconscious mind, where currently NONE
exists). If you are not interested, no problem.
P.S. Re the free will issue, & laws of physics etc, I would suggest that
there is only one thing that should immediately concern you or anyone else -
nobody from Spinoza to Schopenauer to Einstein, to decidedly lesser
deteminist lights like Strawson, Honderich & Smilansky, has ever produced
ONE SINGLE PIECE OF EVIDENCE that animals and humans are determined - that
their decisionmaking and actiontaking shows or obeys any consistent, lawful
patterns of behaviour whatsoever. You can scour the entire literature for
the rest of your life, including Wegner and other determinist scientists,
and you still will not find one piece of evidence. NADA. In hundreds of
years, science still has produced no laws of behaviour for living creatures.
Period. Laws of physics yes, laws of behaviour, none.
Libet will come to your mind - who is in fact entirely irrelevant -
precisely because that is the only thing that even looks like evidence that
has ever been produced.
When you can produce ONE piece of evidence for deterministic behaviour,
then, just possibly, you might have some SCIENTIFIC (as opposed to
philosophical) reason to talk about the "illusion" of free will. Until
then, none.
And if you're a betting man, pay attention to Dennett. He wrote about
Consciousness in the early 90's, & together with Crick helped make it
scientifically respectable. About five years later, consciousness studies
swept science and philosophy. Now he has just written about free will, and
although the book was pretty bad, it was important in being arguably the
first by a scientific philosopher to assert that free will is consistent
with science and materialism. I'll gladly place a friendly (and you might
think outrageous) bet with you that that book is similarly prescient and
free will will be the new default philosophy of science within 5-10 years.
In case you haven't noticed, it is actually already being widely taken in a
kind of de facto, implicit rather than explicit way, as the basic philosophy
of autonomous mobile robotics.
----- Original Message -----
*From:* Benjamin Goertzel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
*To:* agi@v2.listbox.com
*Sent:* Sunday, May 06, 2007 11:49 AM
*Subject:* Re: [agi] The Advantages of a Conscious Mind
Mike,
The conscious mind thinks literally, freely. How long it will spend on
> any given decision, and what course of thought it will pursue in reaching
> that decision are definitely NOT set, but free.
>
Ah, well, I'm glad to see the age-old problem of free will versus
determinism is solved now! Mike has spoken!! ;-)
Seriously ... have you read Libet's work on free will and the brain? Have
you read Dennett's book "Freedom Evolves"? How about "The Illusion of
Conscious Will"?
The illusion of free will is a pretty subtle issue. I have made my own
hypothesis regarding the sort of mechanism that underlies it in the human
mind/brain, which is described in my 2006 book "the Hidden Pattern" and in
preliminary form here:
http://www.goertzel.org/dynapsyc/2004/FreeWill.htm
You guys are clearly moving that way - but still appear to have a
> somewhat confused philosophical understanding of why all this is really
> necessary.
>
Mike ... really ... has it ever occurred to you that you might NOT have a
deeper understanding of these issues than people who have read all the
existing literature on the topics and thought about them for decades??
On some topics, naive intuition can be misleading. Especially topics that
involve illusions we humans have **evolved** to hold intuitively, so as to
make our lives simpler...
Please note that the naive notion of freedom you advocate contradicts all
known physics including quantum physics and (all currently seriously debated
variants of) quantum gravity. (As an aside, it also contradicts most
mystical and spiritualistic thinking which denies the typical, naive Western
over-hyping of the "autonomous individual.")
I remember a story by Kafka about a monkey trapped in a cage, who
developed human-level intelligence with the goal of escaping the cage. I
don't recall the wording but , translated into Goertzel-ese idiom, Kafka
wrote something like: "The monkey was not seeking freedom. By no means.
Freedom is just a complicated illusion. What the monkey was seeking was
something simpler and more profound and important: **a way out** "
;-)
This monkey is also seeking a way out, and I don't think the old illusions
of free will are necessary (or sufficient) for this purpose...
-- Ben G
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