Bacterial Wisdom As Template for Artificial Free Will
If any genuine “free will” exists, it is at the level of the “I-ness” of a system, the decision making routine, that it comes into play. Before we dive into the technicalities of this issue, let’s first try to brainstorm on what can be understood by “free will”. Although intuitively we “know” what “free will” is, just as we know what consciousness is,it is extremely hard to define it in words. Let’s try to build an ontology “free will” by reciting its features and by drawing the borders of this concept from the notions of what it is not.
I followed a very interesting discussion on the issue of free will and whether it is needed in AI, which I will neither repeat nor summarise here, but a number of striking concepts of which I will use in this essay. I do not claim to have come up with those concepts myself nor do I claim to be an expert on the issue, but I believe that I can add some interesting concepts to the discussion deriving from Ben Jacob’s “Bacterial Wisdom”, “Global Brains” and “Societies-of-Minds”. I will also propose to incorporate an artificial functional mimic of “Free Will” in a Webmind such as the AWWWARENet (Artificial World Wide Web Awareness Resource Engine Net).
A number of concepts stood out above the noise of the aforementioned discussion, which I’ll mention here as features (and non-features) of the “free will ontology”:
“Choice, override, randomness, unpredictability, (non)determination, chaotic, (non)causality and evolution”.
Indeed, for a “Will” or decision-taking routine to be “free”, it must be able to override those possible decisions, which are “causality-determined”. In Goertzel´s Webmind the discriminating faculty is the AttentionBroker routine). In the AWWWARENet, the AttentionBroker presents its conclusions, what course of action is to be taken as being the most rational, as having the highest probability of success, to the I.I.I (Identity,Initiative and Illusion generating routine). In as far as the system has an “override” function, the system appears to be endowed with a faculty of “choice” to an outside observer of the system.
The need for a random-picking faculty arises, when the AttentionBroker present the I.I.I-routine with more than one equally likely options i.e. options with identical priorities.
The issue becomes more poignant, when due to a scarcity of resources or time imposed resource constraints not all options can be carried out simultaneously or worse are mutually exclusive i.e. some must be sacrificed at the expense of others.
Which one to choose if they have all equally preferable numerical outcomes of a resultant vector of the pros and cons and the only differences are to be found on a qualitative level?
It goes without saying, that the advantage-disadvantage summing includes attributing preferential weighting of long term advantages over short term disadvantages.
A rational/causal decision for the system will try to optimise the chances for survival of the system in the long term; short term repairable damage can then be tolerated as a temporary sacrifice.
When we look at the only observable example we have of “free will”, i.e. ourselves, (at least we believe we’re endowed with such a faculty – and we need an example of free will, if we ever want to try to simulate or mimic it in an artificial environment), indeed we sometimes override rational reflections, which warrant a safe outcome and take prima facie irrational intuitive decisions based on a “gut-feeling”. Often our animal instincts and/or emotions are capable of overriding a potential well-reflected decision based on a summation of the pros and cons. Goertzel sees these as natural impediments to human superintelligence in his book “The Hidden Pattern”.
Are such override decisions examples of “genuine free will” or are they merely the result of a summation on a meta-level, e.g. where an outcome of the “Emotome” is weighed against an outcome of the “Cognotome”? If the latter is the case, these decisions certainly do not qualify as “free will”but are the result of yet another algorithm. Nevertheless, programmed with sufficient control over the “advice” deriving from the “Emotome”, a superintelligent AI system, which is aware of the routines of the “Emotome” and “Cognotome”, the system will still face situations where it has to choose between equally good (or bad) strategies.
In such cases the system could be programmed to pick one at random. But such a random-picking routine cannot really be equated with “genuine free will”.
When we say that we intuitively choose the solution which “feels best”, perhaps we’re subconsciously performing a search through a space of known similar solutions and we pick the one with the highest degree of similarity of the situational parameters in the solution space or the one with the shortest route to a successful outcome. We might be devising a heuristic. An AI system could be programmed in such a manner, but again such an algorithm does not qualify as genuine free will.
In reality our presumed “free will” is much more limited than we might a priori believe. Tricks played by so-called “mentalists” have shown, that subconsciously registered clues from the most recent peripheral perceptions steer us toward decisions, which we believe to be genuine free will based decisions.
By eliminating all descriptions which are not the product of genuine free will, we may come to a description of free will. Let’s continue the brainstorming exercise in order to ground a pattern of free will from a number of examples.
Let’s start with an extreme example of “choice”, which should not be influenced by “peripheral perceptions”. In the film “Sophie’s choice” there is a scene where Sophie (played by Meryl Streep) is forced to choose one of her children, the other will be killed. Not choosing will result in both children being killed. A parent who loves his children alike and refrains from favouritism might have the following thoughts:
- It is better if one of my children survives than none.
- As these sadistic monsters kill people anyway, there is no good reason to give in to this non-choice as they will very probably kill both children in the end anyway.
- If I do choose one of them, I may buy some time for one of them generating a chance for escape and survival.
- If I do choose one of them I commit a sin: It is immoral to make this decision forced upon by blackmail; One should never give in to that, I’d rather safe my ass in the after world.
- If I do not choose one of them I commit a sin: It is immoral to condemn both death.
- I should choose the most helpless one/the one with the best survival chances.
Thoughts 1,3 and 6 belong to the realm of Necessity (N) and Energy (E) and aim for the “least damage” result. Thoughts 2,4 and 5 belong to the realm of Morality (M). Is the choice being made again the result of a summation vector of N,E and M? Is one’s choice faculty predestined by the idiosyncratic resultant N,E,M vector?
Is “gut feeling” and “feeling like it” a form of aligning your decision as much as possible to your N,E,M vector or is there a way to escape from algorithmic pattern based calculation considerations?
Don’t we sometimes make choices, which are non-rational or even counter-intuitive, the motive being recalcitrance? Is a “what the heck, I’ll just pick one” not the carrying out of a pure random picking algorithm?
Scientists, artists, musicians and other creative persons sometimes have breakthrough insights, moments of pure bliss, where they simply “see” the solution to a complex problem; where a sudden “inspiration” overrides the paradigmatic pathways and fixed action patterns of the basal ganglia.
Such utterly original ideas coming from moments of bliss, especially when coupled to a choice may approach the most, what we intuitively assume to be “free will”.
Another example of apparent free will based choices is when we deliberately and consciously do the opposite: Willingly go against one’s morality, by indulging in this or that bad habit, even if our Emotome and Cognotome tell us differently: The often heard expression is then “The flesh is weak”. When this relates to e.g. possibilities of extramarital sexual intercourse, for many people the overriding force of our animal instincts should not be underestimated. The animal part of the brain then imposes a kind of artificial Necessity on the decision-taking routine, if the mating signal has been given by an attractive candidate of the opposite sex.
