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Dear Canem Malum,

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I understand that free will means autonomy.

I think we all have a certain amount of autonomy. The question is not do we have autonomy, but how much autonomy do we have ? That is a variable and there are limits to it – internal and external limits.

La Boétie wrote a book entitled “Discourse on Voluntary Servitude” in 1547, when he was about 17 years old. I guess there are instances where voluntary servitude is a free choice and others where it is more of an obligation due to circumstances.

Though there may be important differences in the rate of development of autonomy among individuals due to all the variables that contribute to its evolution, progress is nevertheless achieved during the lifetime of each individual. Beneficial mutations and experiences continue to accumulate over time, multiplying and diversifying choice patterns to an ever-greater degree of complexity until the individual is no longer held to obey any particular predetermined course of behaviour, gaining in the autonomy we call free will.

Deep Blue was a chess-playing expert system run on a unique purpose-built IBM supercomputer. It was the first computer to win a match against a reigning world champion under regular time controls. It first played world champion Garry Kasparov in a six-game match in 1996, where it lost four games to two. It was upgraded in 1997 and in a six-game re-match, it defeated Kasparov by winning two games and drawing three.

While Deep Blue, with its capability of evaluating 200 million positions per second, was the first computer to face a world chess champion in a formal match, it was a then-state-of-the-art expert system, relying upon rules and variables defined and fine-tuned by chess masters and computer scientists.

In contrast, current chess engines such as Leela Chess Zero typically use reinforcement machine learning systems that train a neural network to play, developing its own internal logic rather than relying upon rules defined by human experts.

According to my definition, Leela Chess Zero exercises a form of free will. It makes its own decisions.

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Dear Banjo,

Having a sense of autonomy, big or small, does not imply that one has actual autonomy.
(like having a sense that the sun rises, does not imply that the sun actually rises)

Whether or not machines have autonomy is a different and separate question, but even if they had, they have no sense of autonomy like us: being machines, even possibly autonomous machines, they have no sense at all, of anything.

Humans, it seems, are machines too, and assuming that to be the case, the above must hold for humans as well.

That, however, does not change the fact that we do have some sense of autonomy, including the autonomy to use a human like a peripheral device for interacting with the world.

Banjo Patterson- It's a relatively complex question "what is free will" you've said "I understand that free will means autonomy".

This is part of the philosophy of the mind. Often philosophy deals with difficult perhaps unsolvable questions.

Some interesting perspectives ...

- free will implies consciousness awareness (Descartes- 'I think therefore I am' or in this case 'I'm aware therefore I have free will'). Could you have free will without awareness?

- If you repeated the same experiment would the chess program give the same answer?

- Mind Materialist's seem to believe that the mind is like the states of a billard table and if you know the speeds and positions of the balls you can predict the history of the mind. They say that awareness is an emerging property. But three body problems are often unsolvable and are probably 'practically unpredictable'. Quantum effects- The physicist Einstein said to his colleague Bohr that "God does not play dice" believing that hidden states caused the apparent randomness of quantum mechanics. Bell's theorem appears to show that there aren't hidden states. This implies that there are things in the universe that have inherently local randomness and 'non-determinism'. Free will could be a type of non-deterministic or practically unpredictable process