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.