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Thank you so much for your post!

As you may have noticed, I seldom argue from authority and seldom post quotations.

No doubt you are comfortable asserting a position without authentication, but I am not – unless it is a matter of personal testimony. Also, the process has been useful to me, causing me to do a lot of research before formulating an opinion. I’m learning by leaps and bounds here.

I have a very simple "turing test" for free will. First a candidate must demonstrate the ability to learn from experience -- that is, it must demonstrate an ability to recognise recurring situations and respond to anticipated consequenses. Second, the candidate must demonstrate a non-deterministic method of coping with dilemmas -- situations where there are multiple competing consequenses. Insects, reptiles and fish pretty much fail this test, and many mammals pass it. It ain't a complete or pretty idea, but it has a rough correspondence to brain size and complexity, and it has the potential to be quantifiable and testable.

Very interesting. Thanks for sharing your view on how it should be defined!

Since you mentioned Turing (and I’m a research hound) – I found this little tidbit on his attitude about free will:

Alan Turing Scrapbook - The Inspiration

From October 1931 Alan Turing was an undergraduate student at Cambridge, studying mathematics. But he was still deeply involved with the implications of Christopher Morcom's death. In 1932 on a visit to the family Morcom home he wrote out a statement of belief in the survival of the spirit after death which brought in an appeal to the new science of quantum mechanics. It was headed "Nature of Spirit":

The whole essay is given in my book. It suggested that the traditional picture of determinism in physical theory, and the apparent conflict with the sense of free will, had been overturned by the new quantum physics. He thought that quantum physics was directly involved in the brain, an idea suggested by Arthur S. Eddington in The Nature of the Physical World. …

Quantum mechanics was then really 'new physics', only formulated in 1926. But it is still in many ways a mystery. The question of whether it has something to do with the nature of Mind has come to the foreground of serious enquiry again.

Roger Penrose's most recent ideas are linked with the research of Stuart Hameroff on the possibility that the physiology of microtubules in the brain depends crucially on quantum-mechanical effects….

In 1932, it was reading von Neumann's new book on the Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics that first brought Alan Turing to the edge of new work in mathematics. Then in 1933 he read about mathematical logic in the work of Bertrand Russell. Bringing mathematical logic to bear on the problem of mind and matter turned out to be Alan Turing's crucial innovation. In 1935 he was elected to a Fellowship of the college, and in the same year had his greatest inspiration: the idea of the Turing Machine ....

As you can see, that sent me full circle back to biophysics and quantum consciousness – with my favorite players, Penrose and von Neumann. I cannot disentangle philosophy, physics and biology – much less theology - from the subject of "free will."

IMHO, one of the very best launching points on the web is Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind, which has this great essay on theories of quantum consciousness. It sums up the Penrose/Hameroff view and offers these motivations for theories of quantum consciousness:

1. Free will. Many people are convinced that humans have free will, and yet are also convinced that the Newtonian-mechanical goings-on of things as large as neurons makes no room for free will. They thus turn to quantum mechanics in the hope that the non-determinism of the collapse of the wave function will provide a foot in the door for free will. Of course the wave function collapse is, according to current theory, random, and it is not clear that this is any better than determinism when it comes to explaining free will. Nevertheless, the hope seems to be that, at least in some cases, consciousness exerts its influence on the world through effecting some collapses, presumable some in the brain somewhere, in one way rather than another.

2. The unity of consciousness. It is claimed that consciousness has a unity, or wholeness to it, that cannot be explained by reducing consciousness to a scattered group of neurons. Rather, many think that quantum mechanical coherence (a phenomenon whereby many different objects can share a single wave function, and in some respects behave as a single particle) gives an explanation for this. Of course, it could be objected that this line of reasoning rests on a blatant content/vehicle confusion. From the fact that some of our introspections have a content with certain properties (we perceive our consciousness to be non-scattered, for example), it is concluded that the vehicle of this content must also have these properties (being non-scattered, for example). Of course this line of reasoning fails horribly. The bank's computer represents my checking account as a more or less unified entity, but the electromagnetic objects that constitute the vehicle of that representation are scattered widely, and could be scattered over a large geographic area -- perhaps even distributed with parts of record from other accounts --, depending on how their computer hardware is set up. One can write the word 'red' in blue ink. In general, there need be no match between the properties that characterize a content, and the properties of the vehicle that carry that content. Given this, there seems to be little motivation to try to explain the unity of consciousness via quantum mechanical coherence.

3. The mysteriousness of consciousness. Consciousness appears to be an extremely mysterious phenomenon. It is not clear how a collection of molecules whose chemical composition is not unlike that of a cheese omelet could be aware of anything, to feel pain, or see red, or dream about the future. Quantum mechanics also seems to be very mysterious -- particles going traversing two paths at the same time, for example. So perhaps they are the same mystery. Nobody phrases it that way, of course, but this seems to be a line of intuition that motivates many people. It is often argued that mere neurons could not be conscious or aware, and this seems to be because one can imagine all the working of of a neuron, or even a large group of neurons, without seeing how consciousness could be implicated. But because the mechanisms underlying quantum mechanical phenomena are less viaualizable, or comprehensible, or whatever, it seems not to be as clear that something as mysterious as consciousness couldn't work its way into the machine somehow. Clearly, this intuition survives only as long as the mechanisms of quantum mechanics are mysterious to the person making the argument.

With regard to your definition of “free will,” the genetic code itself has the ability to learn from experience and to recognize recurring situations and to respond. The ability to (non-deterministically) cope with dilemmas and make choices is no more challenging than a maze. So, for my purposes, the bar is set too low.

In my view, free will encompasses the ability to hope, comprehend, plan, dream, love, hate, coordinate, control, organize, direct, communicate, sacrifice – to be sentient, self-aware. Without language, IMHO it would be difficult to know if a lower life form is capable of these things.

I'm pinging betty boop and Phaedrus because they might find this discussion interesting.