Turing and Free Will: A New Take on an Old Debate

In 1948 Turing claimed that the concept of intelligence is an “emotional concept”. An emotional concept is a response-dependent concept and Turing’s remarks in his 1948 and 1952 papers suggest a response-dependence approach to the concept of intelligence. On this view, whether or not an object is intelligent is determined, as Turing said, “as much by our own state of mind and training as by the properties of the object”. His discussion of free will suggests a similar approach. Turing said, for example, that if a machine’s program “results in its doing something interesting which we had not anticipated I should be inclined to say that the machine had originated something”. This points to a new form of free will compatibilism, which I call response-dependence compatibilism and explore here.

[1]  Diane Proudfoot,et al.  Turing's Three Senses of "Emotional" , 2014, Int. J. Synth. Emot..

[2]  B. Jack Copeland,et al.  Turing and the physics of the mind , 2013 .

[3]  B. Copeland,et al.  Turing versus Godel on computability and the mind , 2013 .

[4]  A. Hodges,et al.  Alan Turing: The Enigma: The Centenary Edition , 2012 .

[5]  A. Eddington.  The Nature of the Physical World , 1928 .

[6]  Saul Smilansky.  IV*—FREE WILL: FROM NATURE TO ILLUSION , 2001 .

[7]  A. Turing.  On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem. , 1937 .

[8]  A. Eddington,et al.  The nature of the physical world, by A.S. Eddington ... , 1928 .

[9]  Scott Aaronson,et al.  The Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine , 2013, The Once and Future Turing.

[10]  E. J. Lowe,et al.  Personal Agency: The Metaphysics of Mind and Action , 2008 .

[11]  D. M. Hutton,et al.  The Essential Turing , 2007 .

[12]  Diane Proudfoot,et al.  Anthropomorphism and AI: Turingʼs much misunderstood imitation game , 2011, Artif. Intell..

[13]  P. Pettit.  Realism and Response-Dependence , 2016 .

[14]  G JEFFERSON,et al.  The Mind of Mechanical Man* , 1949, British medical journal.

[15]  David Lewis,et al.  Dispositional Theories of Value , 1989 .

[16]  A. Turing.  Intelligent Machinery, A Heretical Theory* , 1996 .

[17]  A. M. Turing,et al.  Computing Machinery and Intelligence , 1950, The Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence.

[18]  Seth Lloyd,et al.  A Turing test for free will , 2012, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences.

[19]  Douglas R. Hartree,et al.  Calculating Instruments and Machines , 2012 .

[20]  D. Proudfoot.  Rethinking Turing's test , 2013 .

[21]  Matthias Scheutz.  Narrow versus Wide Mechanism , 2003 .