Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!itivax.UUCP!dhw From: dhw@itivax.UUCP (David H. West) Newsgroups: comp.ai.digest Subject: Re: free will Message-ID: <19880801184014.0.NICK@HOWARD-JOHNSONS.LCS.MIT.EDU> Date: 1 Aug 88 18:40:00 GMT Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU Organization: The Internet Lines: 48 Approved: ailist@ai.ai.mit.edu To: comp-ai-digest@uunet.UU.NET Path: umich!itivax!dhw From: David H. West Newsgroups: comp.ai.digest Subject: Re: free will Date: Thu, 28 Jul 88 14:20 EDT References: <19880727030413.0.NICK@HOWARD-JOHNSONS.LCS.MIT.EDU> Organization: Institute for Defense Astrology Lines: 37 In a previous article, John McCarthy writes: > 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? At time t0, the robot has available a partial (fallible) account of: the world-state, its own possible actions, the predicted effects of these actions, and the utility of these effects. Suppose it wants to choose the action with maximum estimated utility, and further suppose that it can and does do this. Then its decision is determined. Free-will (whatever that is) is merely the freedom to do something that doesn't maximize its utility, which is ex hypothesi not a freedom worth exercising. At a later time t1, the robot has available all of the above, plus the outcome of its action. It is therefore not in the same state as previously. It would make no sense to ignore the additional information. If the outcome was as expected, then there is no reason to make a different choice next time unless some other element of the situation changes. If the outcome was not as predicted, the robot needs to update its models. This updating is another choice-of-action-under-incomplete-information problem, so again the robot can only maximize its own fallibly-estimated utility, and again its behavior is determined, not (just) by its physical structure, but by the meta-goal of acting coherently. If the robot thought about its situation, it would presumably conclude that it felt no impediment to doing what was obviously the correct thing to do, and that it therefore had free will. -David West dhw%iti@umix.cc.umich.edu