Daily Dialectic

Briegel’s “On creative machines and the physical origins of freedom” discusses the in principle possibility of understanding/creating free will purely on the basis of natural (physics) law. He writes “Even if human freedom were to be an illusion, humans would still be able in principle, to build free robots.” He seems to suggest, if one could ignore the neurobiological dependence, what we would observe is an agent with a complex memory storage and recall. He suggests each memory could be episodic (many clips of input-output bits of information). He also requires that aside a (possibly Quantum) random interrogation and selection along such an episodic memory space, the agent ought to be able to create purely fictitious episodic clips that can be added to the episodic memory space-this he calls the compositional memory.

The whole memory structure/network he calls ECM (Episodic Compositional Memory)-a stochastic network of clips. ECM supposedly allows for agents to carry out Projective Simulations-basically detaching themselves from their physical/causal reality (of responding to sensor data by immediately engaging actuators) in order to “play” memories in their “mind” to generate a (possibly) “free willed” output. Such outputs would then be considered a “spontaneous” response to the environment (these agents would still be determined by physical laws but none-the-less free). According to Briegel, this is supposed to manifest “an original notion of creativity and freedom in their dealing within the environment.”