| What's a thought and why should it matter for free will? What's an intention, and how do you know roomba doesn't have intentions but people do? When roomba tries to go forward but can't and changes direction - how is that different from when a human does it? In the end all the differences are in your model of reality and none of them are in the actual reality. You categorize roomba decision process as "lacking free will" and your own as "having free will". But there's nothing in the actual data justifying that distinction, it's just artifact of our simplified model of the world. Sociall interactions were so important for us that we got huge coprocessors in our brains dedicated to recognizing and simulating decisions processes going on in other humans. We lack such coprocessors for other decision processes like ai or corporations, so we intuitively feel they are qualitatively different. But there's no data to back that intuition. > Ask yourself to what extent a person who lost the ability to form new memories should be responsible for breaking a law that changed after their injury. I could ask why a memory that you form by changing weights on neurons count for a purpose of having free will and memories formed by switching transistors don't. But that's again irrelevant. You can have free will without being able to form memories at all. Besides in all law systems I know you can be punished for a crime you weren't aware even is a crime. |
There is no difference, as long as those transistors are part of a general learning system. A roomba thus does not qualify.