(09-03-2024, 11:43 AM)The Real Marty Wrote:

(09-03-2024, 09:20 AM)mikesez Wrote: Free will is an interesting debate.
But even if our will is not free, both humans and animals have will, we have things we want to do and things we resist. Even when no one is watching, we do things for ourselves because we want to, we will it.
Machines do not have this and may never have it.  Machines wait for a being with will to activate them and give them energy to run.

The law of conservation of energy: Energy cannot be created or destroyed.  
Newton's Third Law of Motion: Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. 

In other words, nothing happens spontaneously.  Everything that happens is caused by something else, and nothing that happens is spontaneous.  In fact, no one can name anything that every happened purely spontaneously.  If something happens spontaneously, without having a natural cause, it would violate one of those well-known laws of nature.  

So if you believe in a natural world, governed by the laws of nature, and if you do not believe in a supernatural world, then you have to conclude that everything that happens is caused by some preceding events and situations.  

So if everything, and I mean everything, is caused by something else, and we are in a universe that is governed by the laws of nature, then even our own actions and thoughts are caused, and not spontaneous.  

Therefore, there is no such thing as free will.

So, in regards to the original discussion, since I do not believe in free will, then humans are machines, and it is possible to create a machine that is so much like a human that it is effectively a human.

I'm not at all convinced by that argument. 
It is true that a process cannot create or destroy the sum of mass and energy, and also true that a process must increase entropy, but this doesn't rule out that there could be a being with free will to select one process instead of another.

And anyhow machines simply don't have will, free or not. All animals resist human efforts to train them to some extent, and every animal has things that they will never do regardless of how you try to train them. But a computer will accept training from anyone who has the administrator level password.

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