If our actions are determined by the laws of nature, can we meaningfully claim to possess free will? Compatibilists argue that the answer is yes, and that free will is compatible with complete determinism. Previously, it has been suggested that the notion of computational irreducibility can shed light on this relation: it implies that there cannot in general be "shortcuts" to the decisions of agents, explaining why deterministic agents often appear to have free will. In this paper, we introduce a variant of computational irreducibility that intends to capture more accurately aspects of actual (as opposed to apparent) free will: computational sourcehood, i.e. the phenomenon that the successful prediction of a process' outputs must typically involve an almost-exact representation of the relevant features of that process, regardless of the time it takes to arrive at the prediction. We conjecture that many processes have this property, and we study different possibilities for how to formalize this conjecture in terms of universal Turing machines. While we are not able to settle the conjecture, we give several results and constructions that shed light on the quest for its correct formulation.
翻译:如果我们的行动是由自然法则决定的,我们能否有意义地声称拥有自由意志?兼容论者认为答案是肯定的,自由意志与完全的确定主义是兼容的。以前,有人曾建议,计算不可减损的概念可以揭示这种关系:这意味着,一般来说,不能对代理人的决定进行“捷径”,解释为何确定剂往往看起来有自由意志。在本文中,我们引入了计算不可互换的变式,目的是更准确地捕捉实际(而不是明显的)自由意志的各方面:计算来源,即对过程产出的成功预测通常必须涉及几乎确切地描述该进程的相关特点,而不论预测需要多少时间。我们推测,许多过程都有这种特性,我们研究如何用通用图灵机来使这种推测正规化的可能性不同。虽然我们无法解决这一猜想,但我们给出了几种结果和构思,说明如何正确拟订该进程。