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According to Jefferson, intelligence requires, in addition to ‘conditioned reflexes and determin-
ism’, a ‘fringe left over in which free will may act’; only then would a machine’s behaviour not
be ‘rigidly bound’ by the programmer.^23 Again what matters is not what the machine does, but
how it does it.
Turing said that ‘it is certain that a machine which is to imitate a brain must appear to behave
as if it had free will’, and so he accepted a link between intelligence and free will.^24 However,
his remarks suggest a very different approach to free will from Jefferson’s stance. Turing said:^25
We must not always expect to know what the computer is going to do. We should be pleased
when the machine surprises us, in rather the same way as one is pleased when a pupil does
something which he had not been explicitly taught to do.... If we give the machine a programme
which results in its doing something interesting which we had not anticipated I should be inclined
to say that the machine had originated something
This is to assume that the concept of free will is a response-dependent concept. On this view,
whether or not an entity possesses free will is ‘determined as much by our own state of mind
and training as by the properties of the object’ (to use Turing’s words concerning intelligence).
If we are surprised and interested by, and if we fail to anticipate, a child’s behaviour, we say that
the child makes his own choices and decisions. We should say the same of a machine, Turing
argued.^26 How the machine does this is irrelevant.