Are the robots we create alive?

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Well, you're free to use the word that way, but I definitely assign a different meaning to the word, and I bet most people do too. To me, it sounds like the difference between perceiving a choice and actually making one.

Voidious19:37, 5 March 2013

Well then, how do you personally define the word "choice"?

Sheldor19:50, 5 March 2013
 

Deciding between two potential outcomes. If there was only one potential outcome, it wasn't a choice, only the illusion of one. Real choice definitely implies free will and non-determinism.

Voidious19:56, 5 March 2013

But, in my example there were two potential outcomes, pizza or salad.

I'll try a new example: Alice has two options, she could have $1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.00 deposited into her bank account, or she could have that much added to her debt. She weighs the two options, and decides to take the deposit because she perceives it to be in her best interest. She could have chosen the second option, but she didn't because she perceived it to not be in her best interest.

Alice's judgement is based on all her memories and past experiences, as well as her current environment, and many other small factors. In order for her choice to be non-deterministic, she would need to abandon all judgement and make her choice completely random.

So essentially, what you're saying is that in order to have freewill and have control over our fate, we need to make all our decisions completely random, without any consideration of how they effect us.

Sheldor21:29, 5 March 2013
 

Not at all. You say: "She could have chosen the second option." But you also say there was never any chance she could have chosen the second option, because the series of events is deterministic. Do you really not see a conflict here?

Voidious21:30, 5 March 2013
 

Free will would allow Alice to choose between maximizing money, choosing at random, or simply pissing off Sheldor. In the first, picking the money is the rational choice. In the second, flipping a coin is a rational choice. In the third, not picking the money is the rational choice.

Memories and past experiences help judge what is the best action for each desired outcome, but don't restrict possible outcomes to a single one.

MN00:27, 6 March 2013
 

Yes, she could have picked the latter option. It was a potential outcome, as was the former. But, she did not. Why didn't she? Because she used her judgement and decided to pick the former.

Her knowledge and memories were the inputs to her judgement, and her decision was the output. Technically speaking, she did not have free will as her knowledge and memories were acquired from prior events. But, to have free will, she couldn't let prior events determine her decision, so she would have to abandon her judgement.

In conclusion, you can keep your free will,

I will choose a path that's clear
I will choose rational judgement.

Sheldor00:40, 6 March 2013

There was 3 judgements up there. Alice must abandon 2 judgements, no matter the choice made.

MN02:01, 6 March 2013

I don't understand what you are saying.

Sheldor02:05, 6 March 2013
 

Knowledge and memories make Alice realize she has 3 (or more) choices.

MN15:30, 6 March 2013
 

She still only has two options: gain an immense sum of money, or spend eternity trying to pay-off that much debt.

You're saying that she has multiple possible motivators. Her motivators define her best interest. If her motivator was to have financial security, her best interest would have her take the money. If she wanted complete free will, her choice could not be determined by prior events, so she would have to either choose randomly, or have someone else choose for her. If her greatest priority in life was to piss me off, then she would perceive choosing the debt to be in her best interest.

Sheldor15:54, 6 March 2013
 

I'm saying she has the choice to go after the motivation or not.

MN17:35, 6 March 2013
 

Her motivation isn't really that relevant to the question of free will vs. determinism. I was assuming that her main motivation would be financial, but even if it wasn't, it would only change the outcome, and not the process of decision-making.

Sheldor00:10, 7 March 2013
 
 

Most people would choose the first, and again if repeated. But because there is an economic force acting against free will. Determinists find it fun, liberalists see it with horror.

It IS possible to destroy someones free will through force. Liberalists fight those situations so people can exert their free will without being opposed by externalities.

Another example, gravity. A determinist would brag no one can fly and there is no choice. A liberalist would build an airplane so people can choose to fly or not.

MN01:31, 6 March 2013

I'm a determinist, and I believe we do have choice. As I've noted before, I believe that we make choices like computers do, our perception of our current environment, as well as our memories of past events, are our inputs, and decisions are our outputs. When our perception and memory give us the same input, we will give the same decisions as output.

Free will is a self-defeating concept, for our choices to be completely non-deterministic, they would have to be truly random (Which I believe is impossible, anyway.), which gives the person in question no say in the matter at all.

Sheldor00:03, 7 March 2013
 

I really think you're warping the meaning of the word "choice" here. Would you say a tennis ball makes the choice to bounce off the ground?

Voidious00:32, 7 March 2013
 

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I would say that excerpt assumes a degree of free will. To a determinist, a tennis ball bouncing and a human's brain pulsing with electricity and then moving a mouth to form a sentence are just a series of atoms interacting in a purely deterministic way according to the laws of physics. Calling one a "choice" and the other "just objects directly following the laws of physics" seems disingenuous.

But I'll drop it if you want to choose to have your cake and eat it too. ;)

Voidious00:53, 7 March 2013
 

Eating cake is unhealthy. ;)

You are correct. I believe all matter in the universe behaves deterministically according to the laws of physics (even those that we have not yet discovered). Not unlike the way cells in Conway's Game of Life interact with each other deterministically.

Intelligent systems are special arrangements or patterns of matter (or Life cells). Intelligent systems behave differently than non-intelligent systems (like a tennis ball), even though they still follow the same physical laws.

Tennis balls could be used to create logic gates. With enough of them, one could create a very basic (and inefficient) computer. Though the tennis balls themselves cannot make decisions, when enough of them are arranged together, they form an intelligent system that can receive inputs and give outputs.

A man actually did create a Universal Turing Machine in Life, using cells that directly obey deterministic laws.

Sheldor01:56, 7 March 2013