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A Chance for Attributable Agency

Can we sensibly attribute some of the happenings in our world to the agency of some of the things around us? We do this all the time, but there are conceptual challenges purporting to show that attributable agency, and specifically one of its most important subspecies, human free agency, is incohere...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Briegel, Hans J., Müller, Thomas
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Springer Netherlands 2015
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4821553/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27076700
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11023-015-9381-y
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author Briegel, Hans J.
Müller, Thomas
author_facet Briegel, Hans J.
Müller, Thomas
author_sort Briegel, Hans J.
collection PubMed
description Can we sensibly attribute some of the happenings in our world to the agency of some of the things around us? We do this all the time, but there are conceptual challenges purporting to show that attributable agency, and specifically one of its most important subspecies, human free agency, is incoherent. We address these challenges in a novel way: rather than merely rebutting specific arguments, we discuss a concrete model that we claim positively illustrates attributable agency in an indeterministic setting. The model, recently introduced by one of the authors in the context of artificial intelligence, shows that an agent with a sufficiently complex memory organization can employ indeterministic happenings in a meaningful way. We claim that these considerations successfully counter arguments against the coherence of libertarian (indeterminism-based) free will.
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spelling pubmed-48215532016-04-11 A Chance for Attributable Agency Briegel, Hans J. Müller, Thomas Minds Mach (Dordr) Article Can we sensibly attribute some of the happenings in our world to the agency of some of the things around us? We do this all the time, but there are conceptual challenges purporting to show that attributable agency, and specifically one of its most important subspecies, human free agency, is incoherent. We address these challenges in a novel way: rather than merely rebutting specific arguments, we discuss a concrete model that we claim positively illustrates attributable agency in an indeterministic setting. The model, recently introduced by one of the authors in the context of artificial intelligence, shows that an agent with a sufficiently complex memory organization can employ indeterministic happenings in a meaningful way. We claim that these considerations successfully counter arguments against the coherence of libertarian (indeterminism-based) free will. Springer Netherlands 2015-08-04 2015 /pmc/articles/PMC4821553/ /pubmed/27076700 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11023-015-9381-y Text en © The Author(s) 2015 Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
spellingShingle Article
Briegel, Hans J.
Müller, Thomas
A Chance for Attributable Agency
title A Chance for Attributable Agency
title_full A Chance for Attributable Agency
title_fullStr A Chance for Attributable Agency
title_full_unstemmed A Chance for Attributable Agency
title_short A Chance for Attributable Agency
title_sort chance for attributable agency
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4821553/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27076700
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11023-015-9381-y
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