[FRIAM] Free will—ghost in the machine or just clever wiring?

[Jochen Fromm]

The question of free will is interesting because there are so many aspects and dimensions. Past experiences and current environment, internal wiring and external forces, etc.Is the system deterministic or not? Robert Sapolsky says no, it is all hard-wired and (pre-)determined. Ergo no free will.Is there a ghost in the machine? Ghost buster Gilbert Ryle says no. Ergo no ghost in the machine which could have a free will.And yet the question of free will still pops up. It probably helps to look at the internal and external forces which control our decisions and how much room they leave us to make decisions.+ when are we free to do what we want? If Maslow's hierarchy of needs is not fulfilled than there is no free will. A homeless person in San Francisco thinks only where he can sleep and what he can eat, while a billionaire can do whatever he wants. He can even use champagner for the shower on his superyacht, as Gregory Salle describes in his book "Superyachts: Luxury, Tranquility and Ecocide")https://earthbound.report/2024/01/15/superyachts-by-gregory-salle/+ what are the hidden forces which try to influence our decisions (thereby reducing our free will) and how can we resist? Advertising and marketing play an important role here as explained in "Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind" by Al Ries and Jack Trout or "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion" by Robert Cialdini or "Advertising, The Uneasy Persuasion" by Michael Schudson and many other booksThus the question should be "who has free will?" Obviously the rich and those who are free of manipulation by marketing, advertising and propaganda have much more free will than the rest.-J.
-------- Original message --------From: Pieter Steenekamp <pieters at randcontrols.co.za> Date: 6/9/25  7:38 AM  (GMT+01:00) To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com> Subject: [FRIAM] Free will—ghost in the machine or just clever wiring? Seth Lloyd’s Turing test for free will (https://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/scientists/lloyd/Turing_Test.pdf) is to consciousness what EPR was to quantum physics: a challenge to the theory's completeness. EPR said quantum weirdness must hide something deeper; Bell said “let's test that”—and nature replied, “nope, it’s weird all the way down.” Nobel Prize, case closed.Lloyd asks: can we prove the mind is just machinery? His test says: build a machine that behaves indistinguishably from a human and believes it has free will. If you succeed—great. But failure proves nothing.Unlike Bell’s inequality, this test can only confirm, never deny. No ghost-busting here.Until then? It’s speculation. The Standard Model explains almost everything—except the quantum gremlins and how observation messes things up. So maybe the mind still has an ace up its sleeve. Or a soul. Or a bug in the code.
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