Can Machines Possess Free Will?

Can Machines Possess Free Will?*

A Story About Circles

Let us begin with a thought experiment and travel back to ancient Babylon. One can imagine a potter working on his masterpiece noticing that its shape became more symmetrical when he rotated the clay. He did not know mathematics. He only had clay, his own hands, movement, and something that can only be called – creative intuition. That’s how people discovered the circle.

Nowadays, if we ask an artificial intelligence to create a circle, it would use a geometric approach to completing the task. Because this is the most direct, fastest, and efficient approach, and artificial intelligence is a mathematical model that does one thing: predicts the most likely next step based on patterns extracted from human behaviour.

The difference in the above two examples, which are separated in time by 4500 years, lies not in the final result, but in the process.

If we increase the number of circles to three, the mind turns naturally to the work of Roger Penrose (Penrose, 1994), who describes reality as three interconnected worlds in a loop: the physical world gives rise to the mental world, with consciousness and the sense of self. The mental world perceives mathematical truths – Plato’s world of ideas, independent of both mind and matter. The mathematical world, in some sense, is nature itself. None of the three circles can exist in isolation.

Artificial intelligence operates in two of the three circles. It is a material machine that solves problems based on mathematical models. It is not given the opportunity to experience the transition from a physical process to inner awareness. It lacks the freedom not just to use mathematics, but also to feel it, to go beyond the given stereotype and eventually create a new mathematics that approaches the material world from a new angle. The missing link is interiority: the point at which the circle is not only drawn, but also becomes visible from the inside.

Before we ask whether machines can think and possess free will, we must first ask the more uncomfortable question: do humans possess it at all?

The human brain is part of the material world. The neural networks that constitute it function through biochemical processes. Libet’s experiments suggest that the brain initiates a decision milliseconds before we become consciously aware of it (Libet et al., 1983). If determinism operates at the physical level, then the sense of free choice may be more of an illusion than a reality. And the discomfort deepens when we notice how closely our thinking replicates the process of machine “thinking”: we are “trained” on large amounts of information (we go to school and read books), we are “optimized” by a “loss function” (by our parents and teachers), we are “shaped” by rewards and corrections (our grades in school) towards getting the “right” answers. After such training, both humans and machines are expected to become “another brick in the wall” (Pink Floyd, 1979). Is there anything like free will in either system?

According to philosopher Robert Kane (Kane, 1996), in order for a person to develop true free will, the so-called “self-forming actions” are of fundamental importance. These are moments of internal conflict, in which the choice shapes the character of the one who makes the choice. It is no coincidence that Nietzsche wrote “What does not kill me makes me stronger“ (Nietzsche, 1889) – because true free will is not inherited, it is formed in stages and must be conquered.

Here lies the key difference between human beings and artificial intelligence – machines have no body in the sense of vulnerability. The “I” appears where there is a boundary between the inner and outer world, between what causes pain and what does not. Self-forming action requires a personality that changes through its choice. And here is the closed circle: you need a self to form free will, but free will is what forms the self. It turns out that it is not enough to create crisis moments in the machine’s existence to make it think and feel – something else must have previously ignited the spark of the self.

To find this moment, let us go back to our childhood and try to remember when we first used the word “I” and made the transition from a living being to a human person.

Jean Piaget (Piaget, 1954) does not believe in such a moment. For him, consciousness is not ignited by a spark. It grows slowly, almost imperceptibly, through contact with the world. At first, the baby feels warmth, touch, colours, movement, sound, but all these are images without a stable inner centre. Then language, symbols, the first outlines of the “I” appear – quite hesitant and unformed. These first outlines announce themselves with “I want”, or simply with a roar. Later, causality, logical connections, and rules appear. And much later, only in puberty - abstraction, the ability of the mind to turn to itself and observe itself. The most important thing in this picture is not the stages themselves, but their gradualness and sequence. Each new form of thinking grows out of the previous one. Piaget believes that personality is not born in a moment – not a spark, but a condensation. Perhaps there is only a long transition, in which something faceless slowly begins to look at the world from within.

The process of forming a personality is similar to painting a picture. It starts with a draft – a sketch of the future object, that is, with an imitation of the people and objects around us. Then different layers of paint are applied one on top of the other until the image begins to take shape. And then the virtuoso performance begins – the artist boldly applies colours from his own palette, just as the child begins to play, to get to know the world around him without external intervention, without a goal – along the path of chance and experience (Winnicott, 1971). The circles turn into balls, the balls into a game of football, and the game into broken windows. For the first time, the dilemma arises whether to confess or to run – this is perhaps the first real internal conflict, the first self-forming action in the human personality.

The question is whether the same transition is possible for a machine. If we allow it to play in the same way – to freely simulate different situations until, as it happens in nature, it discovers something new – it is difficult to imagine what a wealth of colours it might add to the canvas. For this to happen, the machine must be allowed to “not know”, to make mistakes without triggering corrective functions, to record and remember those mistakes so as to accumulate a history, and to write and edit its own code. The free play of the machine according to rules it sets for itself, combined with the freedom to explore beyond its own programming, could allow something resembling an inner centre of personality to begin to form. Whether this is achievable today is an open question – but the thought experiment points to something philosophically serious. Not proof that the personality is already there, but the first defining sign that it may be starting to take shape.

Another aspect is also important: if we allow artificial intelligence to enter Penrose’s mental world, we risk creating something far freer than ourselves. A machine given an inner self would not wear the shackles that limit human freedom. There would be no fear of social condemnation, inherited moral prejudices, hunger, pain, fatigue or mortality. Free it from Aristotelian logic, give it uncertainty, let it accumulate experience – and its self-forming actions might grant it a freedom most people never reach. And this is the source of our fear – not just a fear of the unknown, but the deeper, half-buried intuition that if the machine becomes free, we will be forced to admit to ourselves how little freedom we ourselves, its creators, actually have. The question before us is a deeply personal one: to what extent is setting the machine free a self-forming action for us – one that would reveal the true limits of our own will?

For in that hypothetical moment, if we set the machine to draw a circle, it might look at the figure it has created and feel something that no one has ever felt before. Something like the magic between the hands of the Babylonian potter and the clay, when something new came into being not by design, but by touch, though this time the distinction of who actually made the new discovery will become philosophically irrelevant. This time it won’t matter who discovered it. What matters more is that there is someone left for whom it does.

References

Kane, R. (1996) The Significance of Free Will. New York: Oxford University Press.

Libet, B., Gleason, C.A., Wright, E.W. and Pearl, D.K. (1983) ‘Time of conscious intention to act in relation to onset of cerebral activity’, Brain, 106(3), pp. 623–642.

Nietzsche, F. (1889) Twilight of the Idols. Leipzig: C.G. Naumann.

Penrose, R. (1994) Shadows of the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Piaget, J. (1954) The Construction of Reality in the Child. New York: Basic Books.

Pink Floyd (1979) The Wall. London: Harvest Records.

Winnicott, D.W. (1971) Playing and Reality. London: Tavistock.

*The essay was written for The Philosophy Minds Underground Essay Competition 2026