Singularity Summit At Stanford Explores Future Of 'Superintelligence'

"Methinks the programs were and are semi-empirical, based on human knowledge of principles (weighting various configurations as more advantageous), rather than from ab initio.

Oh, absolutely. Deep Blue had a huge opening book of lines thoroughly worked out in grandmaster-level analysis, and the machine was co-operated by American Grandmaster Joel Benjamin. It took a coordinated team effort to beat Kasparov. If Deep Blue had had to work out its opening play on its own, it is likely Kasparov would have won every game handily."

This is where AI starts. In itself it is still a major accomplishment. Once the game started, the machine won without outside assistance.

But math proofs and other mathematical stuff has been discovered by computers---things no person knew. The boundary people imagine does not exist.

JamesP81 commented:

I think we do have free will, a precious gift granted to mankind by no less than God Himself.

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I replied:

Aren't you ignoring the fact that all animals have free will, even though many are not self aware?

The ability to determine its next action [free will] may not necessarily indicate the level of an entities intelligence.
45 tpaine

I'm not entirely convinced most animals do have free will. They may, but I don't know how you'd prove that one way or another.
62 JamesP81

No system has the ability to know with certainty its next action.
78 by tortoise

-- Tortoise, your observation may indeed 'prove the point' about free will.

Any 'complex animal system' has the ability to vary its next action. -- Or, - the inability "to know with certainty its next action". -- It has free will.

The prohibition on systems perfectly self-modeling can be explained pretty intuitively without getting into hairy mathematics.

First, to deterministically predict the next action of a system, one has to know the entire state space of the system. Second, you have to have an observer making a prediction based upon a trivial analysis of the state to determine what is going to happen next.

This exposes a pretty fundamental inequality. The observer is a finite system with a non-zero Kolmogorov complexity. To perfectly predict the next state of a system, one requires the Kolmogorov complexity of the system (to hold the state information) plus the Kolmogorov complexity of the observer in terms of resources. Unfortunately, by definition one cannot have a computational complexity that exceeds one's own state space to host an observer such that one might perfectly predict one's next state. Not coincidentally, this closely resembles Godel's Incompleteness theorem.

For this reason, no system can ever predict with certainty its next state/action -- making such a prediction always requires a larger system than that about which the prediction is being made. To put it succinctly, perfect prediction of the next state of a system requires a computer with a state larger than the system predictions are being made about. Because of this, it is not possible for any system to make perfect predictions about its own actions -- it can never have the mathematically required Kolmogorov complexity to make such a prediction. Fortunately, this degrades gracefully. It is quite possible to make very good predictions about future actions, just not perfect ones.

This makes for a very interesting and mathematically elegant definition of "free will". No system can ever predict its own next state, but any sufficiently larger system can predict the state of a lesser system. Because of this, no system can ever view its own actions as deterministic even when it can prove that its actions are in fact deterministic in the abstract. In this sense, all systems necessarily must retain a mathematically impenetrable illusion that they have "free will", even when they know full well that they do not.

While many arguments about the subject treat "free will" in terms of absolutes, it is in fact relative. The answer is not so simple as saying we either have it or we do not.

(The formal version of this in the mathematics is very elegant and extremely important as theorems go. That it perfectly frames the question of "free will" is but one of its many controversial side effects.)

Modern political theory on free will owes much to the animal kingdom.
Placing theory on the scales of justice and weighing it against practice can produce similar results to contrasting free will and post-free will-ism. Consider this, spoken at the tender age of 14 by one of the great political analysts Maximilian Rock speaking on the Kolmogorov complexity: 'consciousness complicates a myriad of progressions.' [2] What a fantastic quote.
If free will be the food of politics, play on.
The question which we must each ask ourselves is, will we allow free will to win our vote?

We can say with certainty free will has played a large part in the development of man in the 20th Century and its influence remains strong. It inspires, puts out 'fires', and it is, above all, human.

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The question which we must each ask ourselves is, will we allow free will to win our vote? We can say with certainty free will has played a large part in the development of man in the 20th Century and its influence remains strong. It inspires, puts out 'fires', and it is, above all, human.

Consciousness is arguably nothing more than a high-order algorithmic domain -- self-reflective meta-algorithms -- which greatly strengthen the resistance of our choices to prediction.

As a practical matter, even if we are purely deterministic we must still make choices in our lives, and individuals are generally the most authoritative sources of information about themselves. The idea that all men have "free will" is foundational to our society (and it is assumed in the non-deterministic sense, not the Kolmogorov inequality sense) and much of what we value in our society follows from that. Socialists actually occupy the opposite extreme, invalidly assuming that they can discern the determinism of others and so can remove choice from them with no consequences.

Free will as strong non-determinism works well as a general assumption, since there is some de facto truth to it in practice, though this is because humans are unpredictable to other humans which is indistinguishable from "random" for many intents and purposes. Bad assumption, good results. The strong determinism proponents make a good assumption in the abstract, but skipped the part in math class where humans would still be complex and unpredictable. (ObFutureTangent: given sufficiently powerful external observers aka "computers" with super-human learning abilities, the computers could far more successfully treat humans in this fashion. For systems with roughly equivalent intelligence, it is mostly nonsense.)

I would also note that the absence of free will has far fewer legal consequences than liberal lawyers might argue, particular once the system adjusted. Criminals are still criminals whether they chose to or not, and it would in many ways allow their treatment as a "threat to society" be more appropriate. Just because my car does not have free will does not mean that I do not set the parking brake when parked on a hill.

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