[FRIAM] free will

[Marcus Daniels]

If a LLM had constant inputs from cameras, microphones, chemical sensors, and 
sensiomotor feedback, and was continuously training and performing inference, 
could it have free will?



From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Jochen Fromm
Sent: Monday, February 24, 2025 1:08 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] free will



Actually I don't care much about views or traffic. I don't think many people 
read it except the ones from this list. But I like discussions about 
interesting topics. I mentioned the blog post here because I wasn't sure if I 
have (maybe unconsciously) stolen an idea from one of you. Humans often forget 
where they have first seen or heard an idea. Daniel Dennett mentions in his 
book "I've been thinking" that he was afraid of plagiarism (on page 61-63) and 
describes it as the great academic sin.



I believe LLMs work like humans in this respect: they are like money 
laundering machines for copyrighted ideas who wash away the copyright. They 
also tend to hallucinate, like we do in dreams at night. And they are 
excellent in predicting the next word in a sentence (or action in a sequence), 
similar to the motor cortex. They are in many ways similar to us. It is 
fascinating and a little bit frightening what these LLMs and AIs can do 
already today.



To come back to the question of free will: I am not sure if free willed 
actions are only those that are caused by conscious thoughts. I believe 
conscious thoughts can be used to prevent actions that we do not want. The 
first steps to a free will is to become aware of all the hidden influences 
that try to control it.



We have an "Influenceable will". When we become aware that our will is 
influenced by ads or propaganda or some kind of marketing, we can take steps 
to reduce this hidden influence for example by making the conscious decision 
to stop doing what the ads ask for (for example stop buying McDonald's Big 
Macs although the ads promise us happiness and joy if we do it).



-J.





-------- Original message --------

From: Nicholas Thompson <thompnickson2 at gmail.com 
<mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com> >

Date: 2/23/25 11:59 PM (GMT+01:00)

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com 
<mailto:friam at redfish.com> >, Jochen Fromm <jofr at cas-group.net 
<mailto:jofr at cas-group.net> >

Subject: free will






I put a comment Jochen's blog.   Why dont we carry on over there and help him 
generate traffic.  I have attached here a couple of papers that support the 
view that people are lousy predictors of their own behavior.  If we [and only 
if] we take free willed actions to be those that are caused by conscious 
thoughts, then surely we must know what we are going to do before we start to 
do it and be much better at making such predictions than are the people around 
us.





N





-- 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology

Clark University

nthompson at clarku.edu <mailto:nthompson at clarku.edu>

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson

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