If AGI's choices trace to quantum randomness, is it free or just unpredictable

[Encrypted Daniel]

If an artificial general intelligence's underlying decision process incorporates genuine quantum randomness somewhere at its core, perhaps deliberately, to intentionally avoid full determinism, or perhaps simply incidentally, through quantum effects occurring naturally within its underlying hardware, would that specific system thereby possess something meaningfully closer to free will than an otherwise identical, fully deterministic classical AI system that behaves in exactly the same observable way from the outside.

The intuitive pull toward yes usually rests on the idea that determinism itself is somehow the real enemy of genuine freedom, so introducing genuine randomness at least breaks the otherwise unbroken deterministic chain running all the way back to the system's original programming and initial training. A system whose actions are not fully, exhaustively determined by its prior states feels, at least intuitively, more open, less rigidly fixed in advance, than one whose every single action could in principle be predicted with complete precision given sufficiently complete knowledge of its full initial state.

But most serious philosophers working on free will have long argued that randomness does not actually deliver anything resembling the specific kind of freedom people generally care about when they invoke that word. A choice made because of a genuinely random quantum event is not thereby a choice that reflects the reasoner's own values, character, or considered reasoning any better than a fully deterministic choice would, it is simply unpredictable rather than being determined by anything at all, random rather than free in any meaningful sense of that term. If anything, pure randomness threatens to undermine the very kind of authorship over one's own actions that free will is usually thought to require in the first place, rather than actually supplying or restoring it.

A more promising direction for locating anything resembling freedom in an AGI probably lies instead in the system's capacity for genuinely reflective self modification, whether it can meaningfully evaluate its own values, effectively reason about which specific goals it should actually pursue, and genuinely revise its own behavior accordingly based on that self reflective process, rather than in whether its underlying hardware happens to exploit quantum randomness somewhere far down at a low level implementation detail. That kind of reflective self governance looks considerably more like what compatibilist philosophers have long meant by freedom in the human case as well, rather than the mere absence of strict determinism at some low physical level.

Under that specific reading, quantum randomness inside an AGI's hardware would make its specific behavior genuinely harder to predict in advance, but would not by itself make that system meaningfully more free in any philosophically substantive sense. Freedom, if AGI systems ever turn out to have anything resembling it at all, would need to come instead from the structure and content of the system's reasoning process, not from whatever specific physics happens to be quietly running underneath that reasoning process at the hardware level.