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

[Marcus Daniels]

This conversation is well into bad faith now.  I’m done. 

 

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of steve smith
Sent: Tuesday, June 10, 2025 2:24 PM
To: friam at redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Free will—ghost in the machine or just clever wiring?

 

 

On 6/10/25 9:44 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:

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?

Probably not unless it's brain is positronic. 

For a proof by anecdote, read the corpus of Asimov's work.  ;/

Then go release an Orca into the wild and holler "Free Willy" at the top of your lungs.  If you survive being arrested and convicted for your declaration of putative "public exposure", then note that the entire global population are taking up the practice of head-butting sailboats....   free will much?  

The perils of Free Will(y)?

 

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