Dietrich Doerner

Emer. Prof. Dr. and former Chair of the Institute for Theoretical Psychology, Otto-Friedrich University of Bamberg

Free will is not at all a rare and exotic form of cognition, but normal and frequent practice in everyday organization of action. Free will is the prerequisite of flexibility in everyday behavior. – I am preparing the breakfast. Routine behaviour! I take the box with different cheeses out of the fridge and unwrap the pieces of cheese to put them on a plate. But with a camembert I alter my behaviour. It is very "ripe" and nearly fluid. So I decide to leave it in its paper envelope. The prerequisite for this deviation from the normal routine is to be aware of what I am doing. And to calculate the consequences of my routine behaviour in this special case. I am acting sensibly and do not follow the usual program automatically. I reprogram myself. I free myself from the usual routine.

But how is this possible? How can a system consider its own actions? Isn't that a contradiction in itself? I will show that this is not the case. To be conscious does not mean to consider one's own thinking, but to look at the protocols of past thinking. I do not consider my actual thinking process but the traces which my thinking left in memory. And I consider the routine programs and the consequences which routine behaviour would produce in this special case. So consciousness is not a special form of thinking, "meta-thinking" so to say. But it is quite normal thinking, but thinking , which concerns the traces of itself or considers the plans of behaviour.

I shall demonstrate how a machine, which shows consciousness and free will, could look like.