Related papers: Free Will and Physics
"Intrinsic motivation" refers to the capacity for intelligent systems to be motivated endogenously, i.e. by features of agential architecture itself rather than by learned associations between action and reward. This paper views active…
Motivated by the control theoretic distinction between controllable and uncontrollable events, we distinguish between two types of agents within a multi-agent system: controllable agents, which are directly controlled by the system's…
The transfer of tasks with sometimes far-reaching moral implications to autonomous systems raises a number of ethical questions. In addition to fundamental questions about the moral agency of these systems, behavioral issues arise. This…
Much research in artificial intelligence is concerned with the development of autonomous agents that can interact effectively with other agents. An important aspect of such agents is the ability to reason about the behaviours of other…
Determining whether another system, biological or artificial, possesses phenomenal consciousness has long been a central challenge in consciousness studies. This attribution problem has become especially pressing with the rise of large…
Quantum uncertainty is the cornerstone of quantum mechanics which underlies many counterintuitive nonclassical phenomena. Recent studies remarkably showed that it also fundamentally limits nonclassical correlation, and crucially, a…
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…
Recently, origins of non-deterministic behavior and free will in living systems obtain growing interest (see, e.g. Maye A, Hsieh C, Sugihara G, Brembs B (2007) Order in Spontaneous Behavior. PLoS ONE 2(5): e443.…
Agency is a system's capacity to steer outcomes toward a goal, and is a central topic of study across biology, philosophy, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. Determining if a system exhibits agency is a notoriously difficult…
In honor of Alan Turing's hundredth birthday, I unwisely set out some thoughts about one of Turing's obsessions throughout his life, the question of physics and free will. I focus relatively narrowly on a notion that I call "Knightian…
People often reject offers that are too generous due to the perception of hidden drawbacks referred to as "phantom costs." We hypothesized that this perception and the decision-making vary based on the type of agent making the offer (human…
According to the widely accepted opinion, classical (statistical) physics does not support objective indeterminism, since the statistical laws of classical physics allow a deterministic hidden background, while --- as Arthur Fine writes…
It has been postulated that a good representation is one that disentangles the underlying explanatory factors of variation. However, it remains an open question what kind of training framework could potentially achieve that. Whereas most…
This paper questions the generally accepted assumption that one can make a random choice that is independent of the rest of the universe. We give a general description of any setup that could be conceived to generate random numbers. Based…
A basic model is provided that places active, intentional choices by biological organisms on a solid physical footing. The model is provisionally called "Agent Choice via Quantum Flux." It brings to bear specific physics on living systems…
In this paper we present a computational modeling account of an active self in artificial agents. In particular we focus on how an agent can be equipped with a sense of control and how it arises in autonomous situated action and, in turn,…
A rich class of mechanism design problems can be understood as incomplete-information games between a principal who commits to a policy and an agent who responds, with payoffs determined by an unknown state of the world. Traditionally,…
In this paper we propose to use elements of the mathematical formalism of Quantum Mechanics to capture the idea that agents' preferences, in addition to being typically uncertain, can also be indeterminate. They are determined (i.e.,…
We give an overview of some developments in dependence and independence logic. This is a tiny selection, intended for a newcomer, from a rapidly growing literature on the topic. Furthermore, we discuss conditional independence atoms and we…
Three reasonable hypotheses lead to the thesis that physical phenomena can be described and simulated with cellular automata. In this work, we attempt to describe the motion of a particle upon which a constant force is applied, with a…