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Selmer Bringsjord, 1992.
The Bringsjord argument
"Actually, the argument of this chapter is perhaps more accurately described as an argument not from 'free will,' but rather from the 'infinitude' of the human mind to the negation of (PER-AUT) [the claim the persons are automata]--it's free will which (as will be shown) gets us this infinitude" (S. Bringsjord, 1992, p. 266).
". . . Having noted this, however, it must be conceded that a TM [Turing machine] can enter into only a finite number of configurations during computation over some interval [ti, tk]. This is part of what it means to be a TM" (S. Bringsjord, 1992, p. 267).
"Very well. What moral is to be drawn from these preliminaries? Simply this. If (PER-AUT) is true, if persons are TMs, then persons are capable of entering no more than finitely many internal states or configurations over some interval [ti, tk]. If it turns out that humans are capable of infinitely many mental states over some [ti, tk], then perhaps there arises a rationale for identifying them not with classical automata, but with trial-and-error machines, or perhaps yet more powerful creatures.(S. Bringsjord, 1992, p. 267).
"This chapter is a careful argument that having 'free will,' in light of incompatabilism (the view, put roughly for now, that 'freedom' is incompatible with a 'deterministic' universe), entails having the astonishing capacity to enter an infinite number of mental states in a finite amount of time" (S. Bringsjord, 1992, p. 268).
Reference
Bringsjord, Selmer. 1992. What Robots Can And Can't Be. Boston: Kluwer Academic.
Bringsjord's argument is fleshed out in the "Can automata think?" arguments on Map 7. Also see the "can computers be persons" arguments on this map.
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