Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!SAIL.STANFORD.EDU!JMC From: JMC@SAIL.STANFORD.EDU (John McCarthy) Newsgroups: comp.ai.digest Subject: free will Message-ID: <19880727030413.0.NICK@HOWARD-JOHNSONS.LCS.MIT.EDU> Date: 27 Jul 88 03:04:00 GMT Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU Organization: The Internet Lines: 18 Approved: ailist@ai.ai.mit.edu Date: Sun, 24 Jul 88 18:26 EDT From: John McCarthy Subject: free will To: AIList@AI.AI.MIT.EDU [In reply to message sent Sun 24 Jul 1988 02:00-EDT.] Almost all the discussion is too vague to be a contribution. Let me suggest that AI people concentrate their attention on the question of how a deterministic robot should be programmed to reason about its own free will, as this free will relates both to its past choices and to its future choices. Can we program it to do better in the future than it did in the past by reasoning that it could have done something different from what it did, and this would have had a better outcome? If yes, how should it be programmed? If no, then doesn't this make robots permanently inferior to humans in learning from experience? Philosophers may be excused. They are allowed take the view that the above questions are too grubbily technical to concern them.