Free Will and Determinism

Cognitive science

Notesheet

The brain as an information-processing device - a computer.

The evolutionary perspective: survival value has attached to good information-handling.

What room is there in an information-processing device for autonomy or freewill?

Mechanisms and autonomy

Might increasingly complex mechanisms begin to exercise autonomy?

The Turing Test

The moment you can't tell the difference between a machine and a human being you will have to say the same things about both.

If you say one is capable of thought, you will have to concede the other is capable of thought as well.

If one is autonomous, you will have to grant the other must be.

Two ways of interpreting success in passing the Turing Test

Possibility (A)

Because we can get a machine to copy human behaviour in this way, human freedom is a myth.

Possibility (B)

True autonomy 'emerges' from high fully determined complexity

Emergence

Something utterly new it is said 'emerges' from what began as mechanism.

The wet

It is sometimes suggested that in the history of the Universe oxygen and hydrogen combined and produced something with a property that had not occurred before: wetness.