The Cognitive Capacity of Free Will

Abstract


 For several decades now, artificial intelligence - understood as a discipline but also as a set of increasingly advanced products of robotic science - has helped to rethink certain concepts typical of anthropology, and among these is that of free will, a cognitive capacity that has been seriously challenged by neurophysiology over the last fifty years and which nowadays, however, becomes central when algorithms are constructed to act. The intention of this contribution will be to indicate the necessary prerequisites for conducting an analogical reasoning between humans and algorithms regarding freedom, in order to demonstrate whether such an approach is at least methodologically appropriate for conducting a subsequent ethical reflection. In the last section, an attempt will then be made to define what the discrimen between humans and machines might be, and specifically whether this might be found in consciousness or freedom.