I don't see how that is any different than a human being. We are all just a collection of particles being acted upon by certain fundamental laws of the universe. Why do you think you're so different?
If something acts only due to external forces - a rock rolling down a hill, or a river flowing around some rocks, we say it doesn't have agency.
If something partially acts based on processing/decision making processes running inside its own boundary - like us, or a roomba, we say it has agency.
So it comes down to processing and actions as a result of processing. Doesn't matter whether its deterministic or not.
* = (probably; ultimately it doesnt matter much whether its deterministic or partially random, either way theres no way of finding out the future other than waiting for it to arrive, due to sensitive dependence on initial conditions)
but you can build a computer in game of life that has memory and can base its actions on prcoessing and past input
I mean I'm not saying it conscious or anything. I'm just saying it has agency, which is to say "it is a thing that does things"
It's an attractive idea that some thing has agency (or consciousness, or whatever property you want to define) to the extent it does some sort of computation. But then you have to go figure out what it means for something to do that computation. That turns out to be extremely difficult; most things can be interpreted as computing most other things.
Chalmers paper is behind a paywall but I dont see how your point makes any sense. A rock is not processing anything, an insect or a person or a calculator is. Seems pretty straightforward to me.
The states that Putnam argues are happening inside the rock dont mean anything unless some action results from them. You'll notice I mentioned 'actions as a result of processing' above.
Surely the /concept/ doesn't depend on us having the tech to make such actuators...
Unless you're into panpsychism - which I can't discount because although its a ridiculous explanation of consciousness, all the other possible explanations are equally ridiculous
I suppose for what I'm calling processing there needs to be some order. Things that do processing (our cells, processors, etc) use energy to keep some order in the system (keep lower entropy than their surroundings by using energy from those surroundings). Whereas the river is just at maximum disorder relative to its surroundings the whole time.
You could make a water computer where water flows through pipes and collects in cups and then the weight of the cups implements AND gates and OR gates and so on. But in that case the order is provided by the pipework and the energy input is whatever gets the water to the top of the system (and maintains the pipework from being worn away over time)
Heck, do you even have to know what the sun is to see that it glows in a way the average rock does not?
And yes, I know of blackbody radiation, it's why I used this example. Because blackbody radiation is something you can find in maybe some minimal sense all over the place and yet there's quite a difference between the sun and and the minimal EM emitted by an average rock, just as there is a difference between life with lots of agency and life with very little agency at all (e.g. viruses).
Sometimes the difference is more a difference of degree than kind. What propels us is persistent and internal to the parts of us we control and our own systems are self-stabilizing. What propels most of the universe is largely external and not controlled by anything with any significant agency or ability to deliberate.
But, how do you know every other human is the same and you're not the only one with free will? And following that, how do you know a river doesn't feel the same way?
As for the rest, communication. I can share information with other people and debate this. That's not possible with a river.
Animals are in between, they can clearly understand some things but not everything. Moreover we can point to an ability to process things that predicts this difference in our ability to communicate.
These automaton identifying people however with the ever-elusive force that they cannot identify don't seem any better positioned rhetorically than the free will people, but for some reason they get to claim that free will does not exist just because it cannot be identified with sufficient rigor to match their arguments despite not being able to provide a sufficiently rigorous definition of what happens at the limits where free will breaks down.
If Occam's razor where a thing it seems more sensible just to proceed as if free will actually existed.
Are you even looking?
A river's movements and evolution of its path can be ascertained, analysed, reduced to variables, entered into a model that describes a causal mechanism, and out comes (progressively better) output that matches actual behavior. Thus a river is a natural phenomena subject to natural laws and analytical description.
A human being is an agent that continuously makes choices in a high dimensional choice-space of possible actions that can only be predicted and regulated by extreme measures such as physical confinement, psychological pressure, and denial of natural rythms of the body. A free human being of a given measure of 'wit' or 'curiosity' ("hey, temprature!") in a expansive context of choice would be nearly impossible to 'simulate'.
So simply by looking we "see" that indeed a human being, while certainly a natural phenomena subject to natural laws, exhibits unmatched complexity of behavior, and appears to act on internal reflection which is casually disconnected from immediate physical environment ..
...how could there not be? The idea that we're separate from the environment is an abstraction that allows us to operate in the world but it isn't reality. We're made up of the same elements as everything around us. We are created and built from them, and our brain is an elaborate machine operating on electro-chemical interactions.
If our environment could not influence our behavior, then psychology and psychiatry wouldn't exist.
The only substantial difference is the scale of the system. That you cannot draw a straight line from cause to outcome does not mean the system is not deterministic[0], it just means that it is too complex for you to comprehend.
[0] One might be inclined to bring up quantum mechanics, but that's a property of the entire universe including the river. And quantum behavior is very predictable, even if it is not exactly deterministic.
Yes it is, it just isn't very direct because the system we're trying to influence is very complicated. It's like the weather. We can influence the weather with things like cloud seeding, but it is a complex system so it is difficult to make precise predictions about. Introducing selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors in the brain is similar.
If you are arguing it is not, then you are again arguing a matter of degree. We understand how rivers flow well enough to be able to change that, but all that's missing from doing the same to weather, or the brain, is sufficient understanding of the system.
> Are you familiar with the idea of 'self control'?
Yes, probably much more so than you are since I've struggled with a food addiction my entire life and have managed to lose half my body weight at one point.
Of course you think you are in control, the same way a nematode might believe it is in control, but since we can simulate the entire brain of a nematode on a computer we know that the control is an illusion and the nematode brain is a system reacting to its environment in a complex way.
Our brains are the same, they're just much much larger and more complex. Not being able to simulate them on a computer yet does not in any way suggest that this is impossible.
That's one valid interpretation, yes. We don't choose our genetic makeup, which determines (along with environmental factors) the structure of our brain, and therefore also our mind.
Another valid interpretation is the one we're discussing: that humans are not a special case and that all complex systems can be said to have agency, even if we are not able to recognize it as such.