Free will 3

Captain Mekon

Getting on for three years ago, I thought I had put free will to bed at references 1 and 2. But this morning, I read about autonomy in reference 3 and this afternoon I feel moved to put pen to paper (as it were) again and offer a sketch of Captain Mekon piloting his submersible through the English Channel. A half bother of the Mekon who used to fly the pages of The Eagle when I was young; a chap with not much body but a very large green head.

The submersible has a window at the front, not shown, a keel below, a large rudder and a propeller aft. Rudder and propeller connected to control sticks marked A and B forward. The Captain sits on his chair, gazing intently out of the window, hands on the two controls. Like his half brother, the Captain has a large head and a large brain, with this last more than complicated enough to defy computers to predict exactly what it is going to come up with next.

Now the English Channel is a crowded place with lots of large ships going up and down and lots of smaller ships going back and forth. Not enough room under the large ships for the submersible to go under them. And what with global warming, one thing and another, there is even the odd great white. In sum, the Captain has to be careful if he wants to get through.

That said, sometimes he will be free to run around for a bit without a care in the world. While sometimes he will not have that much choice about what he needs to do if he wants to stay in business.

Or does he? My point is that he is autonomous, he has free will. Generally speaking, the visual stimuli which reach his brain via the window and his two eyes are not hard wired to his control sticks. He can ponder about what to do; the brain will be working away but it will usually give him time to think and possibly to interfere. Maybe he has been able to train himself not to react without thinking. Maybe in a fit of altruism he will charge the great white shark for the greater good of his race. Or because he had boasted about killing the great white shark in the pub the night before. Or maybe he thinks that the shark will work out that he is not going to stop, come what may, and bottle out, sharks being neither altruistic nor suicidal.

No-one looking at all this from the outside, certainly not the shark, can be sure about what the Captain is going to do next. He is an autonomous agent, exercising his free will. Probably not even visible. Even if, as noted at reference 1, his subjective experience of exercising that free will might really be a bit of a con.

And that said, there will be rare occasions when he does lose control, he does lose most of his autonomy, which he will find very frightening. Perhaps the whole submersible will be grabbed by some huge predator and there will be nothing that he do about it, no amount of pushing and pulling on his controls will be of any use. Rather like that space ship which eats enemy space ships in one of the James Bond films.

PS: roughly speaking, non-trivial animals have this sort of autonomy, a property which we have suggested above makes modelling the details of their joint behaviour very difficult. Trivial animals, plants, rivers and mountains do not have it. And while having such autonomy might well be correlated with being conscious, whether or not it is either necessary or sufficient is another matter altogether, matter for another day.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.com/2015/11/free-will-1.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.com/2015/11/free-will-2.html.

Reference 3: The morphospace of consciousness - Arsiwalla, X. D., Moulin-Frier, C., Herreros, I., Sanchez-Fibla, M., and Verschure, P. F. – 2017.

Reference 4: You Only Live Twice - Gilbert, L., Bloom, H. J., and Dahl, R. - 1967. Bing was spot on today with the right answer as hit one to 'space ship with eats enemy space ships in one of the James Bond films'.