Related papers: Free Will and Physics
Defining agency is an extremely important challenge for cognitive science and artificial intelligence. Physics generally describes mechanical happenings, but there remains an unbridgeable gap between these and the acts of agents. To discuss…
We claim that it is possible to have artificial software agents for which their actions and the world they inhabit have first-person or intrinsic meanings. The first-person or intrinsic meaning of an entity to a system is defined as its…
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…
The paper considers the claim that quantum theories with a deterministic dynamics of objects in ordinary space-time, such as Bohmian mechanics, contradict the assumption that the measurement settings can be freely chosen in the EPR…
Superdeterminism has received recent attention as a possible path toward a locally causal explanation of the entanglement correlations that appear in experimental tests of Bell's theorem. While the term `superdeterminism' was coined by Bell…
Creativity, defined as the tendency to generate or recognize new ideas or alternatives and to make connections between seemingly unrelated phenomena, is too vast a horizon to be summed up in such a simple sentence. The extreme abstractness…
According to Dennett, the same system may be described using a `physical' (mechanical) explanatory stance, or using an `intentional' (belief- and goal-based) explanatory stance. Humans tend to find the physical stance more helpful for…
We give a purely logical proof of the J. Conway and S. Kochen Free Will theorem concerning undeterminacy in Quantum Mechanics (Notices of the AMS, February 2009, Vol. 56/2, p. 226). The logical method seems to be very powerful.
This paper presents a model of autonomy called autonomy with regard to an attribute applicable to cognitive and not cognitive artificial agents. Three criteria (global / partial, social / nonsocial, absolute / relative) are defined and used…
Recently it has been claimed that no extension of quantum theory can have improved predictive power, the statement following, according to the authors, from the assumptions of free will and of the correctness of quantum predictions…
Causality has been often confused with the notion of determinism. It is mandatory to separate the two notions in view of the debate about quantum foundations. Quantum theory provides an example of causal not-deterministic theory. Here we…
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…
We formalize two independent computational limitations that constrain algorithmic intelligence: formal incompleteness and dynamical unpredictability. The former limits the deductive power of consistent reasoning systems while the latter…
We introduce the notion of fault tolerant mechanism design, which extends the standard game theoretic framework of mechanism design to allow for uncertainty about execution. Specifically, we define the problem of task allocation in which…
The dominant theories of rational choice assume logical omniscience. That is, they assume that when facing a decision problem, an agent can perform all relevant computations and determine the truth value of all relevant logical/mathematical…
This paper argues that the traditional opposition between determinism and indeterminism in physics is representational rather than ontological. Deterministic-stochastic dualities are available in principle, and arise in a non-contrived way…
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…
I contrast two possible attitudes towards a given branch of physics: as inferential (i.e., as concerned with an agent's ability to make predictions given finite information), and as dynamical (i.e., as concerned with the dynamical equations…
The proliferation of agentic artificial intelligence has outpaced the conceptual tools needed to characterize agency in computational systems. Prevailing definitions mainly rely on autonomy and goal-directedness. Here, we argue for a…
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…