Do human consciousness, thought and choices work like clockwork?

Written and collected by Zia H Shah MD, Chief Editor of the Muslim Times

The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful (non-distributed) computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year. The first of these updates always coincides with the International Supercomputing Conference in June, and the second one is presented in November at the ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference.

Since 1993, performance of the #1 ranked position, for the most powerful computer in the world, has steadily grown in agreement with Moore’s law, doubling roughly every 14 months. As of November 2014, the fastest system, the Tianhe-2 with ability to do 54.9024 quadrillion floating point operations per second, is over 419,102 times faster than the fastest system in November 1993.  Where Quadrillion is equal to a thousand trillion or ten raised to the power of fifteen.

These are mind boggling statistics.  It seems that there is nothing that the computers cannot do.  Tall claims are made by experts in robotics every so often, including that someday they may be their own persons and may have free will.

The Three Laws of Robotics (often shortened to The Three Laws or Three Laws, to make robots non-threatening to humans and popularized by Hollywood, are:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

1. A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

1. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Despite these laws, those who have seen a movie I Robot, which was nominated for the 2004 Academy Award for best visual effects, would recall that one particularly smart robot began to have dreams and developed free will and became part of revolution to enslave humanity.  I do not want to give away the whole story, but only introduce you to this fictional possibility of robots having free will.

Can robots have free will in reality?  To get a handle on this question, let us first examine, do humans have free will?

Encyclopedia Britannica describes free will as, “Free will, in humans, the power or capacity to choose among alternatives or to act in certain situations independently of natural, social, or divine restraints. Free will is denied by some proponents of determinism. Arguments for free will are based on the subjective experience of freedom, on sentiments of guilt, on revealed religion, and on the universal supposition of responsibility for personal actions that underlies the concepts of law, reward, punishment, and incentive.”

Determinism is a theory that all events, including moral choices, are completely determined by previously existing causes

Free will is the ability of agents to make choices unimpeded by certain prevailing factors. Such prevailing factors that have been studied in the past have included metaphysical constraints (such as logical or theological determinism), physical constraints (such as chains or imprisonment), social constraints (such as threat of punishment or censure), and mental constraints (such as compulsions or phobias, neurological disorders, or genetic predispositions). The principle of free will has religious, legal, ethical, and scientific implications. For example, in the religious realm, free will implies that individual will and choices can coexist with an omnipotent, omniscient divinity that raises certain injunctions or moral obligations for man. In the law, it affects considerations of punishment and rehabilitation. In ethics, it may hold implications for whether individuals can be held morally accountable for their actions.

Though it is a commonly-held intuition that we have free will, it has been widely debated throughout history.

Determinism, on the other hand is a theory that all events, including moral choices, are completely determined by previously existing causes. Determinism is usually understood to preclude free will because it entails that humans cannot act otherwise than they do.  Hard determinists believe people are like highly complex clocks – in that they are both molecular machines.

Degree of belief in Hard Determinism or free will divides philosophers into four groups as outlined in the boxes of the diagram below:

The debate about these four possibilities also leads us into another catch 22, the mind–body problem.  In philosophy, the mind–body problem, examines the relationship between mind and matter, and in particular the relationship between consciousness and the brain.  The problem was famously addressed by René Descartes in the 17th century, resulting in Cartesian dualism, and by pre-Aristotelian philosophers, in Avicennian philosophy, and in earlier Asian traditions. A variety of approaches have been proposed. Most are either dualist or monist. Dualism maintains a rigid distinction between the realms of mind and matter. Monism maintains that there is only one unifying reality, substance or essence in terms of which everything can be explained.

Hard determinism (or metaphysical determinism) is a view on free will which holds that determinism is true, and that it is incompatible with free will, and, therefore, that free will does not exist. Hard determinism is contrasted with soft determinism, which is a compatibilist form of determinism, holding that free will may exist despite determinism.

Some of the main philosophers who have dealt with the issues of Determinism are Marcus Aurelius, Omar Khayyám, Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Leibniz, David Hume, Baron d’Holbach (Paul Heinrich Dietrich), Pierre-Simon Laplace, Arthur Schopenhauer, William James, Friedrich Nietzsche, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Ralph Waldo Emerson and, more recently, John Searle, Ted Honderich and Daniel Dennett.

So strong was the belief in Hard Determinism of Pierre Laplace that he said that given the knowledge of every atomic motion, the entire future of the universe could be mapped out.

Einstein was perhaps also a hard determinist.  He felt humans are not responsible for their misdeeds, as they had little choice in the matter.  But, he found it hard to extend this amnesty to the crimes of holocaust.

If free will is denied what chaos will break lose in human societies as a result of lack of reward and punishment is not the focus of this article.

What we want to focus on is that if Hard Determinism be true and free will be only an illusion, then there is no difference in principle, between humans on the one hand and computers and robots on the other.

All of us have experienced in the last decade or two that a Microsoft word file can be opened in countless computers, which have the word program or one compatible with it.  In other words there can be countless substantiations of any file and if it be a popular book, like Harry Potter series, made available on the web, within minutes we could have millions of copies of the file, being read on personal computers and iPADs all over the world.  Likewise, if Hard Determinism be true, with further development in science and technology, the consciousness of individual humans with all their memories, experiences, ambitions, morals, thoughts and their regrets, being nothing more than firing of neurons in a biological machine or lighting up of bits in a computer machine, could be downloaded in form of a digital file and then uploaded on countless robotic machines, creating clones of individual humans in the fullest sense of the word and making accountability and free will a joke.  If human consciousness and personality is like a software file running on hardware of brain and if it can be downloaded to run on other hardware then the concept of soul and accountability would have been falsified.

I believe this is unlikely to happen no matter how advanced our understanding and technology becomes.  Demonstrating and elucidating this claim will require a book and a lifetime of writing.  But, I am taking a short cut here.  I am making the claim on the authority of the Holy Quran and banking on my understanding of a verse about human soul:

And they ask thee concerning the soul. Say, ‘The soul is by the command of my Lord; and of the knowledge thereof you have been given but a little.’ (Al Quran 17:86)

For a more detailed study of this verse and human soul, read an article by me in the Muslim Times, Human Soul: The Final Frontier?

Whether Hard Determinism is true for humans or not is certainly debated by the agnostic and atheist philosophers.  But, its concepts certainly apply to robots and computers.  One may then safely conclude, purely from the study of Hard Determinism that robots will never have free will or a consciousness and a soul that all believers of religion profess that every human has.

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