Related papers: Agency in Physics
Even today, the concept of entropy is perceived by many as quite obscure. The main difficulty is analyzed as being fundamentally due to the subjectivity and anthropocentrism of the concept that prevent us to have a sufficient distance to…
Agentic AI seeks to endow systems with sustained autonomy, reasoning, and interaction capabilities. To realize this vision, its assumptions about agency must be complemented by explicit models of cognition, cooperation, and governance. This…
Influence theory is a foundational theory of physics that is not based on traditional empirically defined concepts, such as positions in space and time, mass, energy, or momentum. Instead, the aim is to derive these concepts, and their…
The world runs on communicated sequences of symbols, e.g. numerals. Examining both engineered and natural communications networks reveals an unsuspected order that depends on contact with an unpredictable entity. This order has three roots.…
We live in an emerging hyper-connected era in which people are in contact and interacting with an increasing number of other people and devices. Increasingly, modern IT systems form networks of humans and machines that interact with one…
Some general considerations on the notion of entropy in physics are presented. An attempt is made to clarify the question of the differentiation between physical entropy (the Clausius-Boltzmann one) and quantities called entropies…
As AI becomes more "agentic," it faces technical and socio-legal issues it must address if it is to fulfill its promise of increased economic productivity and efficiency. This paper uses technical and legal perspectives to explain how…
Traditional models of rational action treat the agent as though it is cleanly separated from its environment, and can act on that environment from the outside. Such agents have a known functional relationship with their environment, can…
Dynamics, the study of change, is normally the subject of mechanics. Whether the chosen mechanics is ``fundamental'' and deterministic or ``phenomenological'' and stochastic, all changes are described relative to an external time. Here we…
In social systems, people communicate with each other and form groups based on their interests. The pattern of interactions, the network, and the ideas that flow on the network naturally evolve together. Researchers use simple models to…
The principle of entropy increase is not only the basis of statistical mechanics, but also closely related to the irreversibility of time, the origin of life, chaos and turbulence. In this paper, we first discuss the dynamic system…
Why is it that a ticking clock typically becomes less accurate when subject to outside noise but rarely the reverse? Here, we formalize this phenomenon by introducing process causal asymmetry - a fundamental difference in the amount of past…
How do human beings make sense of their relation to the world and realize their ability to effect change? Applying modern concepts and methods of coordination dynamics we demonstrate that patterns of movement and coordination in 3-4…
A model is developed to study the effectiveness of innovation and its impact on structure creation and structure change on agent-based societies. The abstract model that is developed is easily adapted to any particular field. In any…
In an emergency situation, the actors need an assistance allowing them to react swiftly and efficiently. In this prospect, we present in this paper a decision support system that aims to prepare actors in a crisis situation thanks to a…
We argue that intelligence, construed as the disposition to perform tasks successfully, is a property of systems composed of agents and their contexts. This is the thesis of extended intelligence. We argue that the performance of an agent…
An agent choosing between various actions tends to take the one with the lowest cost. But this choice is arguably too rigid (not adaptive) to be useful in complex situations, e.g., where exploration-exploitation trade-off is relevant in…
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…
Entropy is a very useful concept from physics that tries to explain how a system behaves from a point of view of the thermodynamics. However, there are two ways to explain entropy, and it depends on if we are studying a microsystem or a…
Time perception - how humans and animals perceive the passage of time - forms the basis for important cognitive skills such as decision-making, planning, and communication. In this work, we propose a framework for examining the mechanisms…