Stephen Wolfram, the computer scientist,
takes on the concept using his mathematical mind:
The problem with human free will is that deterministic stuff is going on underneath, like the chemical processes in our brain, but that we don’t seem to act in a deterministic way. People used to think that deterministic processes must result in deterministic behavior, and that belief has underpinned much of the debate about free will. It’s the reason why the science fiction robots of the 1950s often speak very logically and behave very stupidly. The main scientific discovery is that it must not be like that. We can have simple deterministic underpinnings that result in very complex and seemingly random behavior.
What about intelligence? Wolfram responds:
The question is how we can define intelligence in the abstract. What are the criteria we use to judge whether something is intelligent or not? That’s roughly analogous to the question of whether something is alive or not: People have come up with different definitions over time. The Greeks used to say that something is alive when it can move itself. Well, we know that all kinds of machines can move themselves, so that’s not a good definition. For every definition that relies on chemical or reproductive properties, we can come up with examples that satisfy the definition but probably wouldn’t be considered “alive” by most people. We don’t usually think about life or intelligence in the abstract.
