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Are the Androids Dreaming Yet?

'We consciously, and through the exercise of will, make decisions between different choices without anyone or anything causing the decision in advance. Others can influence decisions – by offering advice or even holding a gun to our head, but we choose.'

If you can devise a better, stronger definition please email me and I will revise my definition to your better one. I'm searching for the most powerful definition of free will – totally free and born out of the exercise of will.

The human mind appears to have free will. At least this is my personal conscious experience. Computers, on the other hand, do not. They run programs that dictate exactly how they will operate in every situation. Could a computer be programmed to have free will? That's hard to do. Let's see why.

Thinking with Clockwork
Astronomers have been predicting the motions of the heavens for centuries and to do this they need accurate clocks. The very first clocks were sundials. These suffered the obvious disadvantage of not working at night, but it was also unsatisfactory to use the motion of the sun to predict the motion of the sun. The earliest 'heaven independent' clocks used water flowing through small holes in pottery vessels. They were effective over short intervals but plagued by dust, dirt and evaporation. It was the invention of the anchor escapement that enabled the first accurate mechanical clocks.

By the sixteenth century clockmakers had gone to town developing astrological clocks with more and more gears, to show all manner of information; the phases of the moon, the motions of planets, even the motion of moons orbiting those planets. These clocks became hugely ornate. The astrological clock at Hampton Court Palace was built for Henry VIII circa 1542 and, as well as showing phases of the moon and the signs of the zodiac, it accurately calculated the time of high tide at London Bridge, allowing Henry to travel quickly to the Tower of London. You might also notice it shows the sun orbiting the earth! Copernicus published his book, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres) showing the earth orbited the sun a year later in 1543, and it took centuries before it became accepted fact.

Clocks need gears. The humble gear is a simple machine. They work because wheels of different size have different circumferences – the distance around the edge – but one full turn is the same for all wheels. Imagine you have a circular sweet such as a Life Saver – or Polo for

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