English
Related papers

Related papers: A Model of Free Will for Artificial Entities

200 papers

Is there a canonical way to think of agency beyond reward maximisation? In this paper, we show that any type of behaviour complying with physically sound assumptions about how macroscopic biological agents interact with the world…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-01-24 Lancelot Da Costa , Samuel Tenka , Dominic Zhao , Noor Sajid

The title refers to the Free Will Theorem by Conway and Kochen whose flashy formulation is: if experimenters possess free will, then so do particles. In more modest terms, the theorem says that individual pairs of spacelike separated…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2021-04-14 Ehtibar N. Dzhafarov , Janne V. Kujala

Narratives about artificial intelligence (AI) entangle autonomy, the capacity to self-govern, with sentience, the capacity to sense and feel. AI agents that perform tasks autonomously and companions that recognize and express emotions may…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Janet V. T. Pauketat , Daniel B. Shank , Aikaterina Manoli , Jacy Reese Anthis

Biological systems often choose actions without an explicit reward signal, a phenomenon known as intrinsic motivation. The computational principles underlying this behavior remain poorly understood. In this study, we investigate an…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-01-05 Stas Tiomkin , Ilya Nemenman , Daniel Polani , Naftali Tishby

After several winters, AI is center-stage once again, with current advances enabling a vast array of AI applications. This renewed wave of AI has brought back to the fore several questions from the past, about philosophical foundations of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-01-17 Srinath Srinivasa , Jayati Deshmukh

Drawing on Ullmann-Margalit's concept of opting (transformative, irrevocable, and shadowed by foreclosed alternatives), we show that current AI systems raise a profound ethical problem that existing AI ethics has not fully captured: the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Eugene Yu Ji

Many applications of intelligent systems require reasoning about the mental states of agents in the domain. We may want to reason about an agent's beliefs, including beliefs about other agents; we may also want to reason about an agent's…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-01-18 Brian Milch , Daphne Koller

The following defines intent, an arbitrary task and its solutions, and then argues that an agent which always constructs what is called an Intensional Solution would qualify as artificial general intelligence. We then explain how natural…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-04-30 Michael Timothy Bennett

The claim of the freedom of the will (understood as an individual who is transcendent to Nature) in the name of XXth century scientific knowledge, against the perspective of XVIIIth-XIXth century scientific materialism, is analysed and…

History and Philosophy of Physics · Physics 2018-01-11 Martin Lopez-Corredoira

Retrocausal models of QM add further weight to the conflict between causality and the possible existence of free will. We analyze a simple closed causal loop ensuing from the interaction between two systems with opposing thermodynamic time…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2016-01-12 Yakir Aharonov , Eliahu Cohen , Tomer Shushi

We spell out a definition of sentience that may be useful for designing and building it in machines. We propose that for sentience to be meaningful for AI, it must be fleshed out in functional, computational terms, in enough detail to allow…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-26 Konstantin Demin , Taylor Webb , Eric Elmoznino , Hakwan Lau

The basic question in the long-standing debate about free will (FW) is not whether FW can be demonstrated to exist nor even whether it exists, but instead how to define it scientifically. If FW is not dismissed as an illusion nor identified…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2012-02-23 Chetan S. Mandayam Nayakar , S. Omkar , R. Srikanth

What is agency, and why does it matter? In this work, we draw from the political science and philosophy literature and give two competing visions of what it means to be an (ethical) agent. The first view, which we term mechanistic, is…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2024-04-23 Jessica Dai

Recent advances in theoretical biology suggest that basal cognition and sentient behaviour are emergent properties of in vitro cell cultures and neuronal networks, respectively. Such neuronal networks spontaneously learn structured…

Contemporary quantum mechanical description of nature involves two processes. The first is a dynamical process governed by the equations of local quantum field theory. This process is local and deterministic, but it generates a structure…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2007-05-23 Henry P. Stapp

Methods for learning optimal policies in autonomous agents often assume that the way the domain is conceptualised---its possible states and actions and their causal structure---is known in advance and does not change during learning. This…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-01-11 Craig Innes , Alex Lascarides , Stefano V Albrecht , Subramanian Ramamoorthy , Benjamin Rosman

As the complexity of AI systems and their interactions with the world increases, generating explanations for their behaviour is important for safely deploying AI. For agents, the most natural abstractions for predicting behaviour attribute…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Alexis Bellot , Jonathan Richens , Tom Everitt

As AI closely interacts with human society, it is crucial to ensure that its behavior is safe, altruistic, and aligned with human ethical and moral values. However, existing research on embedding ethical considerations into AI remains…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-07 Feifei Zhao , Hui Feng , Haibo Tong , Zhengqiang Han , Erliang Lin , Enmeng Lu , Yinqian Sun , Yi Zeng

It is argued that both the "Free Will Theorem" (FWT) and the "relativistic GRW model with Flash Ontology" (rGRWf) hiddenly assume the result of the before-before experiment, and for this reason both FWT and rGRWf imply free will in the…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2010-02-16 Antoine Suarez

As rapid advances in Artificial Intelligence and the rise of some of history's most potent corporations meet the diminished neoliberal state, people are increasingly subject to power exercised by means of automated systems. Machine learning…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2024-04-10 Seth Lazar