Do you have free will? Can you make your own decisions? Or are you
more like an automaton, just moving as required by your constituent
parts? Probably, like most people, you feel you have something called
free will. Your decisions are not predetermined; you could do otherwise.
Yet scientists can tell you that you are made up of atoms and
molecules and that they are governed by the laws of physics.
Fundamentally, then – in terms of atoms and molecules – we can predict
the future for any given starting point. This seems to leave no room for
free will, alternative actions or decisions.
Confused? You have every right to be. This is one of the
long-outstanding unresolved problems in philosophy. There has been no
convincing resolution, though speculation has included a key role for
quantum theory, which describes the uncertainty of nature at the
smallest scales.
It is this that has fascinated me. My research interests include
the foundations of quantum theory. So, could free will be thought of as a
macroscopic quantum phenomenon? I set out to explore the question.
Quantum free will
There is enough philosophy literature on the subject to fill a
small library. As a trained scientist I approached the problem by
asking: what is the evidence? Sadly, in some ways, my research showed no
link between free will and fundamental physics. Decades of
philosophical debate as to whether free will could be a quantum
phenomenon have been chasing an unfounded myth.
Imagine you are on stage, facing two envelopes. You are told that
one has £100 inside and the other is empty. You have a free choice to
pick one – yet every time, you pick the empty one and the magician wins.
This implies that our sense of free will is not quite as reliable as we
think it is – or at least that it’s subject to manipulation, if it is
there.
This is just one of a wide variety of examples that
question our awareness of our own decision-making processes. Evidence
from psychology, sociology and even neuroscience all give the same
message that we are unaware of how we make decisions. And our own
introspection is unreliable as evidence of how our mental processes
function.
So, what is the evidence for the abstract concept of
free will? None. How could we test for it? We can’t. How could we
recognise it? We can’t. The supposed connection between our perception
of free will and the uncertainty inherent to quantum theory is,
therefore, false.
But we do have an experience of free will, and this
experience is a fact. So having debunked the supposed link with
fundamental physics, I wanted to go further and explore why we have a
perception of being able to do otherwise. That perception is nothing to
do with knowing the exact position of every molecule in our bodies, but
everything to do with how we question and challenge our decision-making
in a way that really does change our behaviour. Artificial free will
For me as a scientist, this meant building a model of free will
and testing it. But how would you do this? Could I mimic it with a
computer program? If I were successful how would my computer or robot be
tested?
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The topic is fuelled with prejudice. You would probably assume
without evidence that my brother has free will, but my computer does
not. So I will offer an emotionally neutral challenge: if an alien lands
on Earth, how would you decide if it was an alien being with free will
like us, or a sophisticated automaton?
Strangely, the philosophical literature does not seem to
consider tests for free will. But as a scientist, it was essential to
have a test for my model. So here is my answer: if you are right-handed,
you will write your name holding a pen in your right hand. You will do
so predictably almost 100 per cent of the time. But you have free will,
you could do otherwise. You can prove it by responding to a challenge or
even challenging yourself. Given a challenge you may well write with
your left hand. That is a highly discerning test of free will. And you
can probably think of others, not just finely balanced 50:50 choices,
but really rare events that show your independence and distinguish you
from an automaton.
Based on this, I would test my alien with a challenge to
do something unusual and useless, perhaps slightly harmful even, like
putting its hand near a flame. I would take that as evidence of free
will. After all, no robot would be programmed to do that. A computer with free will?
And so I tried to model that behaviour in the simplest, most
direct way, starting with a generic goal-seeking computer program that
responds to inputs from the environment. These programs are commonly
used across disciplines from sociology, economics and AI. The
goal-seeking program is so general that it applies to simple models of
human behaviour, but also to hardware like the battery-saving program in
your mobile phone.
For free will, we add one more goal: to assert independence. The
computer program is then designed to satisfy this goal or desire by
responding to challenges to do otherwise. It’s as simple as that. Test
it out yourself; the challenges can be external or you can generate your
own. After all, isn’t that how you conclude that you have free will?
In principle the program can be implemented in today’s computers.
It would have to be sophisticated enough to recognise a challenge and
even more so to generate its own challenges. But this is well within
reach of current technology. That said, I’m not sure that I want my own
personal computer exercising free will... Mark Hadley is a visiting academic in physics at
the University of Warwick. This article first appeared on The
Conversation (theconversation.com)
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It is this that has fascinated me. My research interests include
the foundations of quantum theory. So, could free will be thought of as a
macroscopic quantum phenomenon? I set out to explore the question.
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