Talk by Hans Briegel at the MCMP (Wed. 24.04)

[Dardashti, Radin]

Speaker: Hans Briegel (Innsbruck)
Wednesday 24th April 2013
Ludwigstr.31 Room E021
Time: 6 to 8 pm

Title: On Agency and Freedom under the Laws of Nature

Abstract: I will discuss the possibility of freedom for agents that 
are, with no exception and at all scales of their body, subject to 
physical law. I will relate the discussion to a model of an artificial 
agent that exhibits a primitive notion of creativity and freedom, which 
is part of a recently introduced scheme of information processing called 
projective simulation. This provides an explicit proposal on how we can 
reconcile our understanding of universal physical law with the idea that 
higher biological entities can acquire a form of freedom that allows 
them to increasingly detach themselves from a strict dependence on the 
surrounding world.