Your Smartphone Has Free Will

What is free will and do we have it? It is a subject that has occupied the minds of many great thinkers and a question that has confused millions of burgeoning philosophy majors throughout history. And because this is 2013, now we're adding smartphones to the mix.

MIT professor Seth Lloyd is the latest person to throw a hypothesis into the proverbial ring, drawing on mathematics and the theory of computation to answer this seemingly intractable question. What he proposes is that a self-administered Turing test of sorts would allow someone or something to check in on its own sense of free will. His scheme has implications not just for humans, but also for the devices and operating systems we currently rely upon so heavily.

In the course of his explanatory paper, which can be found on the arXiv pre-print server, Lloyd argues that whether or not a decider (which he defines as any “decision-making system”) will make a decision, or what that decision will be, is not a computable inquiry.

“Even if the world and their decision-making process is completely mechanistic—even deterministic—no decider can know in general what her decision will be without going through a process at least as involved as the decider’s own decision-making process,” writes Lloyd. This lack of predictability, he suggests, is what gives us the feeling that we possess some free will.

His free will Turing test consists of four yes-or-no questions:

• Am I a decider?
• Do I make my decisions using recursive reasoning, that which can be mimicked by a digital computer?
• Can I model and simulate—at least partially—my own behavior and that of other deciders?
• Can I predict my own decisions beforehand?

Humans can answer these questions easily. Lloyd notes that lying is certainly a possibility, but the test is not supposed to test whether a thing has free will. Rather, it is supposed to assess that thing’s sense of free will. So really, if you lie, the only person it matters to is you.

But what of our increasingly capable and intelligent devices: our smartphones and our computers? Is it possible these technological objects, or “human artifacts” as Lloyd calls them, might also have a sense of free will?

Lloyd makes a compelling, if not slightly unsettling, case for the answer being “yes.” In his own words, “the operating system is a decider par excellence.” It makes decisions, is capable of recursive reasoning, and is capable of self-reference. An operating system, he says, "seems to possess all the criteria required for free will, and behaves as if it has it."

His latter claim about self-referential devices could give you a bit of mental indigestion due in part to its suggestion that it is possible to attach a concept of “self” to our technological accoutrements. But what Lloyd refers to is not a phone’s capability to, say, contemplate its own morality. Rather, an operating system’s self-referential nature alludes to its ability “to allocate memory space and machine cycles for its own operation as well as for apps and calls.”

Lloyd wants you to understand, however, that just because our smartphones or laptops may theoretically have the capacity for free will, that definitely does not imply that our technology is conscious. (Well, not yet anyway.) Of this distinction, he writes, “An entity that possesses free will need not be conscious in any human sense of the word.”

We cannot engage our iPhones in Lloyd's free will Turing test, though its not because they aren’t capable, but simply because programmers didn’t equip them with that particular functionality. However, were we able to do so and ask them the four questions above, Lloyd suspects, and illustrates via imagined dialogue in his paper, that they would be just as perplexed by the philosophical quandary of free will as we are:

You: Do you make these decisions of your own free will?

OS: Aaargh! (Bright flash. Blue screen of death…)

@heyiamlex