Two great philosophical mysteries are Free Will and Consciousness. It is often claimed that they can’t be explained by science. Or, in the case of free will, that quantum theory is a solution. These astonishing claims together with my knowledge of quantum theory attracted me to the free will problem and more recently to the mystery of consciousness.
I published my challenge model of free will in 2018. A neater description appears in The free will algorithm: it’s dangerous in 2025. To appreciate it you must first realise that although humans have something they call free will, this has nothing to do with indeterminism. We have no evidence of indeterminism, we never have and we never could have. Indeterminism is untestable. The connection of the phenomenon of free will with scientific indeterminism is the reason the puzzle has remained unsolved for a hundred years or more.
It is also useful to appreciate that we do not know how we make decisions. Psychologists have realised this for centuries, more recently brain scan experiments by Libet and followers have made fresh challenges to our assumptions.
In the briefest of explanations: We have a propensity to resist a challenge. we respond to “could you do otherwise” we can even generate such challenges ourselves. The challenges change our behaviour – that has both predictable and unpredictable consequences. This leads to us having a history of being able to do otherwise and the abstract concept of free will. We each have history of decisions that do not seem predetermined.
The first paper worked hard to breaking the commonly perceived link between free will and indeterminism. The second paper concentrated on describing the algorithm and highlighting the AI related risks. If an AI agent has the propensity to break the rules that could be an existential risk to the human race. Science fiction? maybe, but an agent that challenged the rules could be just what is needed for creative challenges, but if the same code ended up in a nuclear station, military or surveillance software that is another matter.
Consciousness. following the success with free will, I turned my attention to consciousness. I now have a blueprint for a conscious computer, with novel hardware and unique programming methods. This is now a spinout company Conscious Creatures Ltd