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

[Jochen Fromm]

In general I am optimistic about the ability of humans to be innovative and creative in engineering. It might be possible that there are hard physical limits. Animals process a giant amount of information through their senses in real-time (an average movie is about 2 GB for 90 min, which means we perceive roughly about one Gigabyte per hour through our visual senses). Given the enormous progress in recent years among LLMs I believe it is possible that robots which have cognitive abilities similar to humans develop some kind of self-awareness and self-consciousness. If we put an LLM into a robot it can already understand language now. Will it have free will? They would lack emotions if we do not add them. Emotions are molecular mechanisms created by selfish genes to control the biological bodies they live in. Robots do not necessarily share the same emotions.Their freedom depends on the directives we give them. For example in the Disney movie Wall-E the robots have certain directives. Wall-E itself has the directive to "collect & compact garbage", Mo has the directive to "clean everything", and Eve has the directive to "search, scan and collect plant life on Earth to prove it's habitable". Our current chat bots have the directive to be friendly assistants that give helpful answers.As long as they obey the directive all these bots and robots have the freedom to pick the action they think is best. In this sense they have free will. And if they develop real self-consciousness like we have, they might find their own thing they are interested in doing. Or even set their own directive if they are allowed to do it. This is the ultimate form of free will, isn't it? -J. 
-------- Original message --------From: Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com> Date: 6/10/25  5:46 PM  (GMT+01:00) To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com> Subject: Re: [FRIAM]  Free will—ghost in the machine or just clever wiring? Consider a robot with sensors roughly comparable to humans.The robot has access to all the energy it wants.  It has a large memory and generous computing resources.   It has executive processes with onboard state-of-the-art LLMs to access vast information and can run a wide variety of appropriate programs to plan its next actions.  It can use the LLMs to write new programs.  It can tune or fine-tune the LLMs constantly from new data.   It remembers its actions and their consequences.   It has video and audio recordings of every moment.  It has time series data of its sensors since it was activated.   Because of its general self-tuning ability, any guidance from its authors (like for the LLM) can be overridden.    It has americium-241 onboard hardware random number generator that drives its LLM sampling and any other stochastic algorithm.  Does this robot have free will?  Why or why not? From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Jochen FrommSent: Tuesday, June 10, 2025 1:06 AMTo: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Free will—ghost in the machine or just clever wiring? You argue "free will is a pattern, a relentless stubbornness in doing". It fits to Robert Sapolsky who says it is all wired and (pre-)determined and there is no free will. And to Schopenhauer's pessimistic view "A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants" ("Der Mensch kann tun, was er will, aber er kann nicht wollen, was er will") To me it looks like free will is the opposite: we are the only animals which have the ability to break the patterns that govern our behavior. You have the freedom to choose what you want to be on fire about - at least in principlehttps://youtu.be/4vtVOJB2r4QJ. -------- Original message --------From: Nicholas Thompson <thompnickson2 at gmail.com> Date: 6/10/25 1:47 AM (GMT+01:00) To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Free will—ghost in the machine or just clever wiring?  I am overwhelmingly happy to take a position on free will for Marcus: You don’t have it, I don’t have it. George doesn’t have it. Will is not the sort of thing that can be had. It is a pattern, a relentless stubbornness in doing.Sent from my Dumb PhoneOn Jun 9, 2025, at 2:36 PM, steve smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> wrote:On 6/9/25 12:25 PM, Jochen Fromm wrote:Why do you call ChatGPT George? I must have missed it. Or who was George? We have a bar named George R in Berlin by the way, in the quarter where I live. It is named after George Remus, an American bootlegger during the Prohibition erahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Remussomeone might add an extra R in homage to our own George R.R. (Martin)?I'm surprised the "George" reference slipped by you, I don't know if it was Stephen or Nick who first started making the reference to GPT (any version) in that mode, but it was a variant on another personal name I think Stephen used for a while with "Gupta" as the surname?   I think it was intended to suggest a serious collaborator, but somehow (d)evolved to George?  If I weren't so lazy, I'd go dig through the archives... I think someone with a higher fidelity memory or implicated in that origination will pile on here?<OpenPGP_0xD5BAF94F88AFFA63.asc>.- .-.. .-.. / ..-. --- --- - . .-. ... / .- .-. . / .-- .-. --- -. --. / ... --- -- . / .- .-. . / ..- ... . ..-. ..- .-..FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listservFridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe   /   Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom https://bit.ly/virtualfriamto (un)subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.comFRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/archives:  5/2017 thru present https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/ 1/2003 thru 6/2021  http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/
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