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42 Are the Androids Dreaming Yet?
“We consciously, and through the exercise of will, make decisions
between different choices without anyone or anything causing the
decision in advance. Others can influence decisions — by offering advice
or even holding a gun to our head, but we choose:
If you can devise a better, stronger definition please email me and
I will revise my definition to your better one. I’m searching for the most
powerful definition of free will — totally free and born out of the exercise
of will.
The human mind appears to have free will. At least this is my
personal conscious experience. Computers, on the other hand, do not.
They run programs that dictate exactly how they will operate in every
situation. Could a computer be programmed to have free will? That's
hard to do. Let’s see why.
Thinking with Clockwork
Astronomers have been predicting the motions of the heavens for
centuries and to do this they need accurate clocks. The very first clocks
were sundials. These suffered the obvious disadvantage of not working
at night, but it was also unsatisfactory to use the motion of the sun to
predict the motion of the sun. The earliest ‘heaven independent’ clocks
used water flowing through small holes in pottery vessels. They were
effective over short intervals but plagued by dust, dirt and evaporation.
It was the invention of the anchor escapement that enabled the first
accurate mechanical clocks.
By the sixteenth century clockmakers had gone to town developing
astrological clocks with more and more gears, to show all manner of
information; the phases of the moon, the motions of planets, even the
motion of moons orbiting those planets. These clocks became hugely
ornate. The astrological clock at Hampton Court Palace was built for
Henry VII circa 1542 and, as well as showing phases of the moon
and the signs of the zodiac, it accurately calculated the time of high
tide at London Bridge, allowing Henry to travel quickly to the Tower
of London. You might also notice it shows the sun orbiting the earth!
Copernicus published his book, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On
the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres) showing the earth orbited the sun
a year later in 1543, and it took centuries before it became accepted fact.
Clocks need gears. The humble gear is a simple machine. They
work because wheels of different size have different circumferences — the
distance around the edge - but one full turn is the same for all wheels.
Imagine you have a circular sweet such as a Life Saver — or Polo for
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