Do animals have free Will?

[genkaus]

Then the programmer giving the computer inputs is not doing the programming either.

The person writing the program is.

A PC can also filter what it wishes- antivirus. A self taught behavior?

No. The antivirus has to be installed externally.

Is learning self taught? I wasn't aware that it was.

Jury's out on that one. Teaching someone to learn seems counter-intuitive, doesn't it?

Perhaps it was simply an expression of your ability to think clearly and assess a situation or concept dispassionately, developed over millions of years of trial and error with an untimely death as the penalty for failure?

Along the same lines, but slightly OT. Let's imagine for a moment that we discover AI. We might give this entity personhood (maybe because we make the case that it has free will), but I've always been amused that this same event would also easily justify removing the title of person from ourselves..since we could no longer be said to be different from a machine...we prefer the former over the latter. I mention this because It's not that I disagree with your position on much of this, but because I'm skeptical of any determination of what constitutes a thought, or free will, or personhood, etc, that arises from the minds of human beings. "Our" thoughts are somehow different, "our" programming is somehow our own, everything else is inferior by comparison because we use our own characteristics as the bar. I used AI above, but when I take a look around me (at things which exist outside of my little thought experiment), it's very difficult to distinguish exactly what is doing the programming, and exactly what is exhibiting "free will" from what is not.

Upon creation of AI, either those specific machines should be given personhood, or we would see the return of human slavery. If, on the other hand, we keep being irrational and keep on insisting that humans are special and therefore have rights (sounds like us, doesn't it?), it won't be too long before we see the "Matrix" or the "Terminator" unfold before our eyes. And the machined would be justified too.