"The Little Robot That Could"

Dilbert creator Scott Adams has blogged in the past about his belief that free will is an illusion. Me, I freely choose to believe that Scott is full of crap on this point... except that I haven't put my finger on any compelling reason why he's wrong except that I would prefer it. Well, that's plenty of reason, I say!

Anyway, he has a new post on the subject up, which includes a quick precis of his past arguments, and offers his latest. An excerpt:

Of all the controversial topics I’ve raised on this blog, free will is the one that seems to most grab people by the nuts and/or teats and twirl them around. I understand why. Belief in free will is the reboot button for civilization. Don’t read any further until you have saved your applications.

A lot of smart, thoughtful people are religious or at least believe in some sort of relevant God. It’s a safe belief to have, in the sense that there’s no way to disprove the existence of an entity that is beyond time and space and the natural world – whatever any of that means. If you throw in the concept of omnipotence and his “mysterious ways,” you even have an airtight case for why he can avoid detection by atheists. I will avoid the question of God’s existence today because it is a debate no one can win.

Luckily there is a simpler question that is almost equally important: Do humans have free will?

If we DO have free will, that leaves open the door that God could exist and might be relevant to the choices we make throughout our lives and beyond. But if we DON’T have free will, God is no more important to our choices than he is to the toaster’s choices. In that case, choices are illusions.

Unfortunately, I can’t convince most people that free will doesn’t exist. I have tried arguing that the laws of physics clearly apply to brains, and brains cause your actions. That seems so obvious to me that belaboring it with additional evidence would be overkill. And yet, the free willys counter my seemingly airtight chain of reasoning with something that sounds a lot like this:

“I come to a fork in the road. I can choose to go left or right. Therefore I have free will.”

No one doubts that you FEEL as if you make choices in those situations. But the argument ignores the fact that your specific brain in that specific situation can only operate in one specific way unless the rules of physics stop applying at decision-making time.

Some free willys argue that the universe is brimming with uncertainty at the quantum level, as if that helps the case for free will. But at most it makes the case that our actions might have a random component, and that’s very different from free will.

Today I offer a new approach to understanding why you don’t have free will. I call it The Little Robot That Could. I will show that a robot, designed with current technology, could exhibit everything you call free will. Once you accept that the robot has every bit of “choice” that you have in this world, your superstition about your own choices will begin to dissolve.

He continues here.