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From: yamauchi@SPEECH2.CS.CMU.EDU (Brian Yamauchi)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Free Will & Self-Awareness
Message-ID: <1484@pt.cs.cmu.edu>
Date: 21 Apr 88 03:58:53 GMT
References: <4134@super.upenn.edu> <3200014@uiucdcsm>
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In article <3200014@uiucdcsm>, channic@uiucdcsm.cs.uiuc.edu writes:
> 
> I can't justify the proposition that scientific endeavors grouped
> under the name "AI" SHOULD NOT IGNORE issues of free wil, mind-brain,
> other minds, etc.  If these issues are ignored, however, I would
> strongly oppose the use of "intelligence" as being descriptive
> of the work.  Is it fair to claim work in that direction when
> fundamental issues regarding such a goal are unresolved (if not
> unresolvable)?  If this is the name of the field, shouldn't the
> field at least be able to define what it is working towards? 
> I personally cannot talk about intelligence without concepts such
> as mind, thoughts, free will, consciousness, etc.  If we, as AI
> researchers make no progress whatsoever in clarifying these issues,
> then we should at least be honest with ourselves and society, and find a
> new title for our efforts.  Actually the slight modification,
> "Not Really Intelligence" would be more than suitable.
> 
> 
> Tom Channic

I agree that AI researchers should not ignore the questions of free will,
consciousness, etc, but I think it is rather unreasonable to criticise AI
people for not coming up with definitive answers (in a few decades) to
questions that have stymied philosophers for millenia.

How about the following as a working definition of free will?  The
interaction of an individual's values (as developed over the long term) and
his/her/its immediate mental state (emotions, senses, etc.) to produce some
sort of decision.

I don't see any reason why this could not be incorporated into an AI
program.   My personal preference would be for a connectionist
implementation because I believe this would be more likely to produce
human-like behavior (it would be easy to make it unpredictable, just
introduce a small amount of random noise into the connections).

Another related issue is self-awareness.  I would be interested in hearing
about any research into having AI programs represent information about
themselves and their "self-interest".  Some special cases of this might
include game-playing programs and autonomous robots / vehicles.

By the way, I would highly recommend the book "Vehicles: Experiments
in Synthetic Psychology" by Valentino Braitenburg to anyone who doesn't
believe that machines could ever behave like living organisms.

______________________________________________________________________________

Brian Yamauchi                      INTERNET:    yamauchi@speech2.cs.cmu.edu
Carnegie-Mellon University
Computer Science Department
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