AB,
No matter how complex the programming, there can be no concept of free will in a computer because the self awareness needed to invoke an act of free will is not definable in computer code. Man made machines attaining self awareness will remain in the annals of science fiction - they will never exist in real life because every event in a computer program is defined by the conscious will of the programmer, not the machine.
First, “there can be no concept of free will in a computer" is a just an unqualified assertion, not least because you have no idea how sophisticated at least in principle computers could become.
Second, you vastly underestimate first the complexity of brains and secondly the exponential increase in complex emergent properties even relatively small increases in processing ability confer. If you increase processing performance by, say, 10% you don’t get 10% more emergent properties – you get many times more. How else would you explain the huge differences between us and, say, Bonobos when we share around 98.7% of our DNA?
Third, for practical definitional purposes you
are a "computer" (or actually a probability computational organism) – only a vastly more complex one than anything we can create for ourselves just now, and in case you hadn’t noticed our species isn't “man-made” either.
Fourth, the whole point about emergence as a phenomenon is that you can’t predict what effects the interactions of relatively simple instructions will produce. You’re horribly lost in the notion that a computer (or rather its software) can only duplicate what its programmer intended, but imagine if there were no such things as ants for example and you wrote a programme for them with the same functionality that ants actually have (“follow a trail of pheromone X to find food” for example). Imagine your surprise when from your very simple suite of instructions there emerged all the complex behaviours of ant colonies that had never even crossed your mind as possible outcomes. That’s the point you’re fundamentally misunderstanding here.
Fifth, even if you want to conjure up an invisible little man at the controls despite the total absence of evidence or cogent logic for such thing, and then claim that this invisible little man somehow accesses a menu of wants our brains produce and then selects the preferred one,
still that process of selection would itself be the result of a
want. And your only way out of
that would be to invent another, even smaller man at the controls to "drive" the first one. And your only way out of the same problem for
that invisible even tinier man would be etc etc. It’s just your infinite regress problem again.
This is why when you’re asked for logic to support your assertions you can’t produce any. It’s not that it’s there but you don’t know what it is, it’s that there's no logic to support you
at all. And that presumably explains your indifference to relying solely on either silence when asked for it, on unqualified assertions, or on one or several basic logical fallacies.
Face it Alan – you’re dead in the water here. Share your faith beliefs in the appropriate place if you want to, but you have no place among thinking and reasoning people if you expect your claims and assertions to be taken seriously.
