As Joe Katzman says, it’s hard to know whether this should be comforting, or frightening:
Within fifty generations of this electronic evolution, co-operative societies of robots had formed – helping each other to find food and avoid poison. Even more amazing is the emergence of cheats and martyrs. Transistorized traitors emerged which wrongly identified poison zone as food, luring their trusting brethren to their doom before scooting off to silently charge in a food zone – presumably while using a mechanical claw to twirl a silicon carving of a handlebar moustache.
You might be upset by this result, scientific proof that those who say “Evil is utterly fundamental to human nature” actually understates the scope of the problem, there were also silicon souls on the side of the angels. Some robots advanced fearlessly into poison zones, flashing warning lights to keep other robots out of harms way.
This seems to be congruent with Axelrod’s work. I wonder if the successful ones use Tit for Tat?
So, do they have free will?
Good and Evil instinctive strategies (which cause successful behaviors) precede the ability to perceive Good and Evil for what they are, and choose between them. Free Will flows from Perception, Understanding and Choice.
If it is free will, and not robots or the origin of ethics that you are inquiring about, you might as well ask whether people have free will. I’ve never understood why people, and particularly those with scientific and engineering knowledge, believed that their will was free.
Bertrand Russell pithily summed up the human condition with regard to so-called free will: “We can do as we please, but we can’t please as we please.”
I don’t understand why they built robots at all. It would seem they could have just produced software which would make it a lot easier for others to peer review their work. All the article does is present their claims which means the rest of us really have no basis for any conclusions. Game theory is relatively simple to follow, but I’m not sure what to make of this.
OTOH, building this little robot terrarium was probably fun for them.
I’m curious if any of the robots that were ordinarily functioning well suddenly realized the futility of their existence and decided to end it all by purposely driving into a poison zone. Most life only knows how to do one thing: survive. Humans have the unique ability to choose to die. Also, thinking itself is an active choice on our part. A switch is not just flipped on that forces us to think or automatically perform a series of learned actions. We have to actively choose to think about the concepts for survival.
Philosophically, you need the doctrine of individual free will to support a political doctrine of individual liberty. Without free will, it’s too easy to argue that limiting people’s choices is okay because they don’t really have any choice anyway.
McGehee,
Simply believing in cause and effect (and believing that people are part of the physical world, made of atoms and so forth) does not imply any particular political philosophy. Many of us are constituted such that we don’t want to be unjust or accept injustice, and the fact that we are made of atoms doesn’t change that. Anyway, Bertrand Russell’s formulation allows for your concern — we should be allowed to do as we please, even if we can’t please as we please.
People on either (or any) side of the free will debate can enjoy Kurt Vonnegut’s take on the subject:
“”Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly; Man got to sit and wonder, ‘Why, why, why?’ Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land; Man got to tell himself he understand.””
Before quantum physics it might be argued that we are all part of a Cartesian mechanistic world of cause and effect and free will is an illusion. Without free will, life is pointless and one result is the same as any other (and then the universe dies.) Quantum physics introduces the idea that every path is explored and one is chosen (which sounds an awful lot like free will) contrary to cause and effect (which gave Einstein fits so he proposed contradictions that turned out not to be.)
So I think I’d have to disagree and say that some political philosophies may be more suited than others (ah, survival of the fittest philosophy?)
I don’t see how any model which replaces mechanical cause and effect with randomness has any bearing on the question of free will, or on political philosophy. In either case, the atoms in your brain are subject to the same laws (or the same randomness) as the atoms in a rock.
I think that “free will” implies that the atoms in your brain are somehow privileged and can somehow escape the laws (or randomness) that governs the universe, and I don’t see how that could be the case.
A life without free will certainly isn’t pointless, and political liberty is still just as important as ever – even without a”free” will, you still have a will, and if you are not in chains, you can still take pleasure and find meaning in exercising your will.
In other words: Physics, it’s the law. Fortunately, physics doesn’t make life suck.
I don’t see how any model which replaces mechanical cause and effect with randomness…
There’s your problem. Randomness doesn’t replace cause and effect. Both are part of classical physics (although random could better be described as pseudo random.)
It’s not about privileged atoms in the brain either. Free will is by definition the superseding of cause and effect. We can make choices and cause and effect take over from there. There are quantum structures in the brain made from normal atoms just like in rocks (I think ref’d in Penrose’s book?)
Nobody understands quantum physics. What we do understand is that cause and effect are not all there is. We try to understand it by describing it as probabilistic but that’s just trying to fit it back into a classical framework… because quantum physics makes no sense even though it appears the world works that way.
Applications of quantum physics have already greatly changed our world and I don’t think we’ve even scratched the surface. I’m not even sure we can understand it any more than we can understand where free will actually comes from… but both can be observed.
I wondered that too, but I’m fairly sure he means the ostracism and/or killing of an animal, ie. the literal sacrifice of a living animal. I think. I’m still trying to figure out actually what he does mean here and whether he’s right in his description of what that sort of sacrifice is. I somehow think I disagree but I’m going to ponder it a bit more.