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From: Perry Swanborough <Perry.Swanborough@jcu.edu.au>
Subject: Re: influencing the environment in Tierra
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neil@ogham.demon.co.uk wrote:
>steidl@centuryinter.net wrote:

(extended philosophical discourse between two identities who pass what I 
understand to be the Turing test snipped)

>>Here's a thought experiment for you:  If an a-life form were
>>sufficiently developed to question whether or not it itself has
>>free will and decides that it does, would you agree with it?
>
>Having free will does not automatically make something alive any more than
>the ability to add up does. I could build a robot that had a simple piece of
>code that chose a random direction to move in once its put on the ground, a
>limited form of free will admitedly but nobody chose the direction for it , yet
>the robot is not alive.
>
>NJR

A robot whose behaviour is controlled by a deterministic program 
(there's a tautology for you!) is not behaving in any way that I 
understand to be free will, regardless of whether we consider the 
program's output to be random or not.

Perry

