| I did not downvote (and you're clear now) but your post is not a relevant argument. The determinism that the SFWT is arguing against is that of certain hidden variable theories of quantum mechanics. It states that if the humans are free to choose particular configurations for an experiment measuring this or that spin, then bounded by relativity and experimentally verified aspects of quantum mechanics, the behaviors of the particles cannot be dependent on the past history of the universe. The main characters are the particles, people are incidental. > "Our argument combines the well-known consequence of relativity theory, that the time order of space-like separated events is not absolute, with the EPR paradox discovered by Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen in 1935, and the Kochen-Specker Paradox of 1967" So as far as I can tell, it takes for granted the humans' ability to choose the configurations freely, which though suspect in of itself doesn't matter so much to their argument as it's not really an argument for free will, it's a discussion of how inherent to quantum mechanics non-determinism is. > "To be precise, we mean that the choice an experimenter makes is not a function of the past." > "We have supposed that the experimenters’ choices of directions from the Peres configuration are totally free and independent." > "It is the experimenters’ free will that allows the free and independent choices of x, y, z, and w ." It is actually, if anything, in favor of no distinction between humans and computers (more precisely, it is not dependent on humans, only a "free chooser") as they argue that though the humans can be replaced by pseudo random number generators, the generators need to be chosen by something with "free choice" so as to escape objections by pendants that the PRNG's path was set at the beginning of time. > The humans who choose x, y, z, and w may of course be replaced by a computer program containing a pseudo-random number generator. > "However, as we remark in [1], free will would still be needed to choose the random number generator, since a determined determinist could maintain that this choice was fixed from the dawn of time." There is nothing whatsoever in the paper that stops an AI from having whatever ability to choose freely humans have. The way you're using determinism is more akin to precision and reliability—the human brain has tolerances but it too requires some amount of reliability to function correctly, even if not as much as computers do. In performing its tasks, though the brain is tolerant to noise and stochasticity, it still requires that those tasks happen in a very specific way. Asides, the paper is not an argument for randomness or stochasticity. > ” In the present state of knowledge, it is certainly beyond our capabilities to understand the connection between the free decisions of particles and humans, but the free will of neither of these is accounted for by mere randomness." |
>There is nothing whatsoever in the paper that stops an AI from having whatever ability to choose freely humans have.
There is if an AI is dependent on deterministic methods. I agree that AI is not a well-defined term, but all proposals I have seen are algorithms, which are entirely deterministic. This is entirely at odds with the human conception of free choice. An algorithm will always produce the same choice given the same input. Any other behavior is an error.
The SFWT says that observations can be made that cannot be replicated through deterministic means, which would seem (I agree there is a very slight leap in logic here) to rule out any AI from ever being able to understand at least some aspects of our reality (and also reveals them to be simple, logical machines, with no choice).