Related papers: Free Will: A New Formulation
The concept of free energy has its origins in 19th century thermodynamics, but has recently found its way into the behavioral and neural sciences, where it has been promoted for its wide applicability and has even been suggested as a…
It is argued that it is possible to give operational meaning to free will and the process of making a choice without employing metaphysics.
We tackle the problem of consciousness by taking the naturally selected, embodied organism as our starting point. We provide a formalism describing how biological systems such as human bodies self-organize to hierarchically interpret…
Capacity of conscious agents to perform genuine choices among future alternatives is a prerequisite for moral responsibility. Determinism that pervades classical physics, however, forbids free will, undermines the foundations of ethics, and…
The problem of defining and locating free will (FW) in physics is studied. On basis of logical paradoxes, we argue that FW has a meta-theoretic character, like the concept of truth in Tarski's undefinability theorem. Free will exists…
In physics, there is the prevailing intuition that we are part of a unique external world, and that the goal of physics is to understand and describe this world. This assumption of the fundamentality of objective reality is often seen as a…
Physics has long lived with a schizophrenia that desires determinism for measured systems while demanding that experimenters decide what to measure on a whim. Intriguingly, such a free will assumption for experimenters has thwarted many…
Purpose and meaning are necessary concepts for understanding mind and culture, but appear to be absent from the physical world and are not part of the explanatory framework of the natural sciences. Understanding how meaning (in the broad…
From what is known today about the elementary particles of matter, and the forces that control their behavior, it may be observed that still a host of obstacles must be overcome that are standing in the way of further progress of our…
Active inference is a leading theory of perception, learning and decision making, which can be applied to neuroscience, robotics, psychology, and machine learning. Active inference is based on the expected free energy, which is mostly…
This article presents a formal model demonstrating that genuine autonomy, the ability of a system to self-regulate and pursue objectives, fundamentally implies computational unpredictability from an external perspective. we establish…
Any scientific attempt to explain consciousness is tasked with reconciling the third person objective perspective of science with our first person subjective experience of the world. A good point of departure is to consider situations in…
In a recent series of papers and lectures, John Conway and Simon Kochen presented The Free Will Theorem. "It asserts, roughly, that if indeed we humans have free will, then elementary particles already have their own small share of this…
Consciousness is notoriously hard to define with objective terms. An objective definition of consciousness is critically needed so that we might accurately understand how consciousness and resultant choice behaviour may arise in biological…
I briefly present a personal view about alleged scientific results on free will.
We discuss the possibility of freedom of action in embodied systems that are, with no exception and at all scales of their body, subject to physical law. We relate the discussion to a model of an artificial agent that exhibits a primitive…
The paper proposes a fresh look at the concept of goal and advances that motivational attitudes like desire, goal and intention are just facets of the broader notion of (acceptable) outcome. We propose to encode the preferences of an agent…
The most enigmatic aspect of consciousness is the fact that it is felt, as a subjective sensation. The theory proposed here aims to explain this particular aspect. The theory encompasses both the computation that is presumably involved and…
We consider the paradoxical concept of free will from the perspective of Theoretical Computer Science (TCS), a branch of mathematics concerned with understanding the underlying principles of computation and complexity, including the…
Affordances, a foundational concept in human-computer interaction and design, have traditionally been explained by direct-perception theories, which assume that individuals perceive action possibilities directly from the environment.…