Towards Implementing Free Will - Bruce Edmonds

Philosophical appendix

There is no stopping some people philosophising, however inappropriate or unhelpful this is in particular contexts. Such people seem to think that it is both possible and useful to formulate generally and reliably true principles (i.e. principles completely without exceptions regardless of context) about the world using argument. For these people I briefly outline my position below, for full details they will have to come and argue with me.

The "hard" deterministic thesis is untestable and has no practical consequences - the world is equally explained using it or otherwise since we can not rewind the world to see whether this thesis does in fact hold. The only consequences it can thus have is to sanction a normative claim about the use of the term "free-will" - this amounts to no more than a position that given I conceive of the world as determined then there can not be anything denoted as an indeterministic process including free-will.

The above point can be demonstrated by considering the following thought-experiment: compare a human who had a `real indeterminism pump' with an otherwise identical human with only a good `pseudo-random' generator - there would be no testable or practical difference between them. The distinction is thus irrelevant except in how we conceive of our world.

There is a lot of evidence against the hard deterministic thesis both at the micro-level (quantum effects) and at the macro level (that many complex systems are not determinable in practice).

Any strengthening of the deterministic thesis to make it actually applicable (e.g. that given almost identical circumstances a certain identifiable system will exhibit the same behaviour) renders it false when applied to some systems - for example humans will not always exhibit the same behaviour in practically indistinguishable circumstances (even if they do not recall their previous decisions).

I can see no reason why an indeterministic process has to be arbitrary.

It is difficult to see how any conception of free-will that did not come down to the principles (1)-(5) above could have any realisable meaning.

It is very difficult to see how the facility of free-will evolved in us as a species if it was not implementable and was inextricably linked with its practical consequences so it could be selected for [7].

It is much more useful (in the analysis of issues surrounding free-will) to consider the practical sources, advantages and consequences of different kinds of free-will as argued in Dennett [3] and Sloman [13].

Thus the practical, common-sense conception is a better representation of free-will than many of the idealised, philosophical characterisations of it. When involved in a process of implementation, it is wise to base one's work on the best representation available.

Towards Implementing Free Will - Bruce Edmonds - 16 MAR 0

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