Are Computers Intelligent (or Could They Be in the Future)?

The Role of Free Will

People commonly consider free will to be a basic component of being human.

We can make our own decisions, and we can reach our own conclusions.
It seems obvious that computers cannot exhibit free will.
Thus, computers cannot reach their own decisions and conclusions, an important part of intelligence.

Let's consider these points more closely.

Making our Own Decisions

Copeland gives the following description of an experiment of H. H. Kornhuber.

Over the next half minute, suddenly raise the index finger of your right hand three or four times. Pick your moments spontaneously as you go along. Try to notice whether there is any appreciable time lag between choosing your moment and your finger beginning to move.

[Please try this now!]

OK. If your subjective experiences were the same as mine, the movement in your finger muscles will have followed on more or less immediately from your conscious decision to initiate the action. The astonishing thing is that a technician equipped with the right instruments would have known you were going to raise your finger about a second before the movement began. H. H. Kornhuber and his associates performed this classic experiment in the seventies, using subjects with a number of electrodes fixed to the scalp and finger. It was discovered that a characteristic pattern of brain activity would begin to build up to as much as one and a half seconds before the finger movement commenced. (Copeland, p. 142)

This experiment raises some fundamental questions:

Is our decision to raise our finger coming from our unconscious, rather from conscious thought?
Is free will largely a subjective quality?
Is free will an illusion?
Is our behavior based completely on genetics and past experiences?
(Such a view is called determinism. For example, behaviorist B. F. Skinner believed that our behavior is completely determined by our past history and our environment. There are several variations of this — all beyond the scope of this talk.)

Randomness in Computing

Numerous events in nature exhibit randomness, such as radioactive decay.

Connecting a Geiger counter to a radioactive source could give give a sequence that increases at random times.
Checking whether the counter were even or odd could given a mechanism to choose fairly and randomly between two alternative choices.

Quick Conclusions

The level of actual free will within people can be debated.
If required, computers could make non-deterministic choices; computer processing need not be deterministic.
The tie between intelligence and free will requires clarification, and differences between free will in people and computers may be more apparent than real.

created 8 January 2007
last revised 15 February 2007

previous next