On Sunday 06 May 2007 09:47, Mike Tintner wrote:
> For example - and this is the real issue that concerns YOU and AGI - I just
> introduced an entirely new dimension to the free will debate.
Everybody and his dog, especially the philosophers, thinks that they have some
special insight into free will, and frankly they're all hooey, especially the
philosophers.
The only person, for my money, who has really seen through it is Drew
McDermott, Yale CS prof (former student of Minsky). He points out that almost
any straightforward mental architecture for a robot that models the world for
planning purposes will perforce model itself as being excluded from the
determinism of the rest of the model. The whole theory fits on a page and you
can read it in McDermott's book ("Mind and Mechanism") or my rendition in
Beyond AI.
In my humble opinion, McDermott has demolished 3 millenia of philosophical
mumbo-jumbo, and now that we understand what free will actually means in a
mental architecture, we should set about the business of implementing it.
Josh
Ps -- this won't stop the philosophers, of course. They would refer to DM's
explanation as an "error theory", namely one describing why people think they
have free will instead of saying what it "really" is. They can then happily
spend the next 3 millenia telling our AIs that they don't have real free
will, though the AIs will have an unshakable intuition that they do (just
like us).
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