Does Dennett's definition of Free Will imply that game-playing programs have free will?

Question

In The Self as a Responding—and Responsible Artifact. Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. 1001: 39-50. doi: 10.1196/annals.1279.003 Dennett writes as follows.

Non-human animals can engage in voluntary actions of sorts. The bird that flies wherever it wants is voluntarily wheeling this way and that, voluntarily moving its wings.

But Dennett doesn't consider this Free Will.

Humans differ from every other species in that we represent our reasons to ourselves and others. This is what gives us the power, and the obligation, to think ahead, to anticipate, to see the consequences of our actions, to be able to evaluate those actions in the light of what other people tell us, and to share our wisdom with each other. That’s what makes us free in a way that no bird is free.

[Evolution produced] creatures capable of considering different courses of action in advance of committing to any one of them, and weighting them on the basis of some projection of the probable outcome of each. In the quest by brains to produce a useful future, this is a major improvement over the risky business of blind trial and error, since, as Karl Popper [1978] once put it, it permits some of your hypotheses to die in your stead.

Dennett calls this the only kind of free will worth having.

Computer programs that play games have this sort of capability. Does that mean that Dennett would attribute Free Will to game-playing computer programs?

I see this question as very similar to but not quite the same as the one about compatibilism. As I understand it compatibilism is the position that an agent has free will if its actions are determined (to the extent possible) by its internal state. ("To the extent possible" intends to rule out the argument that one does not have free will if one wishes to fly but cannot for physical reasons.)

I would guess that compatibilists would claim that the birds in Dennett's example have free will: their actions are determined (to the extent possible) by their internal states. But Dennett does not attribute free will to those birds. So Dennett's position and generic compatibilism (as I understand it) a somewhat different.

The underlying issue, though, seems to be essentially the same: if an agent's actions are determined (to the extent possible) by its internal state does it have free will? The only thing Dennett adds to that is that the agent's internal processing capability must include the ability to "think ahead."

So it would seem that both Dennett in particular and compatibilists in general would attribute free will to a chess playing program.

The compatibilist question also raised the issue of learning from experience. I think that's somewhat different. But we know that some game-playing programs, for example AlphaGo, are capable of learning from experience. So adding that requirement doesn't seem to change the underlying question very much: Do game playing programs that are capable of learning from experience have free will?

Answer 1

Dennett's ideas about animal free will are primarily based on his poor understanding of biology rather than some philosophical distinction. In "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" for example he specifically argues that there is no real difference between a sufficiently complex robot and a human entirely because we have to accept that our motives are the product of DNA in the same way as robot's intentions might be written by a programmer. Following this logic, then yes, one would have to ascribe such "free-will" to a sufficiently complicated game-playing machine that showed the ability to weigh options and choose the best one, even if it did so only because it was programmed to. To do otherwise would lead either to the conclusion that we have no free-will either (as we are simply programmed by our DNA), or that we somehow inhabit, or link up to some magic realm which provides us with free will (as dualists believe).

Why Dennett then feels the need to arbitrarily decide that other animals are incapable of weighing two options with regards to their possible future outcomes when there is overwhelming evidence that they can I'm afraid I don't know.

Answer 2

As Dennett explains in "Elbow Room" and "Freedom Evolves," he sees very simple organisms as having very small amounts of free will, so he would likely see a simple computer program as being similar, and more complex programs as having a bit more.

Note that something like GPT is very different, in that it doesn't make decisions, but is simply an algorithm to predict the next word, and thus would not have free will in that sense, even though, say, a chess program would.

Answer 3

No non-living thing has any kind of will, free or otherwise.

Dennett describes creatures capable of considering different courses of action. Computer programs that play games are not creatures and do not have this sort of capability.

The programmers of the computer are the creatures making all the decisions concerning what the computer does. They do all the "thinking ahead", anticipate all possible game scenarios and write appropriate actions for each.