My (similarly religious) opinion is that because we _can_ simulate biological systems, computers can and will have free will too. Human brain is just a physical object that has some particular structure. We have free will (yes, I believe in free will). Then, we are not special, there can be other systems with free will, and we can build them.
If consciousness can be recreated by a computer, then a billion people holding flags up and down could recreate a computer, and consciousness could exist within the flags people are holding. But I do not believe in this form of consciousness and I don’t see a computer simulation as the same.
> computers can and will have free will too
What is free will if it's simply causation? i.e., environmental inputs leading to differences in charge, altering other differences in charge, leading to outputs, leading to environmental outputs, leading to changed environmental inputs, etc. If the chain can be examined and is entirely deterministic, be it neuronal or silicon circuits, where's the escape hatch?
Another thought experiment: if there's something that is you, that decides, and presented two different realities where the environment, brain, etc. were precisely the same, what would cause there to be a difference in decision? If it's deterministic, how is that free will? If it's random, how is that free will?
Physics is famously non-deterministic. Quantum physics is built on irreducible randomness, it is incompatible with determinism (except for evolutions of probability quasidistributions). And we don't even need to try to find "quantum interactions" in human brain — every physical system is quantum, for every photon that touches retina. There's enough indeterminism to hide entire universes.
Free will is the interplay between determinism and randomness, an emergent phenomenon with multiple self-recursive feedback loops and path dependence. Even if we could trace it through all these loops and find all the mixtures of quantum randomness and classical deterministic patterns it emerges from, it wouldn't make it any less magical.
Appreciate the thoughtful comment. Yes, under the hood indeed "every physical system is quantum", yet at the macro level physical systems are more or less predictable, including the brain. The brain's immensely complex structure and extensive interactivity make understanding how it works largely a mystery. The relatively simplistic models we're able to create have so far illuminate only a small part of its functionality.
The idea of free will has been a subject of eternal debate. I suspect this reflects lack of consistent definition. I would posit that free will isn't absolute but necessarily constrained by the nature of individual exercising its will. The stochastic attributes of a system or entity mean its actions are to an extent unpredictable, providing an "opening" for willful behavior.
Humans imagine they have free will because they're aware of their decisions or actions while unaware of the range of factors contributing to a decision or action. Intuitive (vs. analytical) cognition is the operational default. By definition intuition is a computation occurring outside of the person's awareness.[0] Consequently, it augments the impression of exercising unfettered free will.
Perhaps it's most accurate to say we have will or volition but not free of constraints imposed by our biology and physical/social environments. While the randomness inherent in biological systems allows volition to evolve, it also limits what an organism can will itself to do.
[0] Journal of Cognitive Engineering and Decision Making 2017, Volume 11, Number 1, March 2017, pp. 5–22
> Perhaps it's most accurate to say we have will or volition but not free of constraints imposed by our biology and physical/social environments.
You might be talking about compatiblism.
> Humans imagine they have free will because they're aware of their decisions or actions while unaware of the range of factors contributing to a decision or action.
Or more likely there’s no evolutionary fitness benefit to being able to understand this, and perhaps it’s even detrimental if it leads to nihilistic or egocentric impulses.
I’ll repeat the question you might have missed
> If it’s random how is it free will?
Stochastic processes won’t get you to free will any more than determinism.
Aren't we just saying that matter is complex enough to form an input to a model of the world and self which results in a really complex feedback loop where organisms which adjusted actions to increasingly complex projected model state had more descendants?
The self is just the only part of the model directly wired to our neurons and self awareness is just correct labeling.
In that context will is certainly a function of a how much a things internal model of self encoding the idea that its actions are moreso based on its own model than the tgings its model is built with and ability to make this distinction right or wrong and free will is basically meaningless.
Its certainly not a magical out for determinism all the qualities that we imbue with such meaning are as based on the same principals as anything else.