Free Agency and Determinism: Is There a Sensible Definition of Computational Sourcehood?

Can free agency be compatible with determinism? Compatibilists argue that the answer is yes, and it has been suggested that the computer science principle of "computational irreducibility" sheds light on this compatibility. It implies that there cannot, in general, be shortcuts to predict...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) Switzerland), 2023-06, Vol.25 (6), p.903
Main Authors: Krumm, Marius, Müller, Markus P
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Algorithms
Analysis
Compatibility
computational irreducibility
Computer science
Concrete blocks
Decision making
Determinism
Free agency
Free agents (Sports)
Free will
Phenomenology
Simulation
simulation preorder
Turing machines
universal Turing machines
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Summary:Can free agency be compatible with determinism? Compatibilists argue that the answer is yes, and it has been suggested that the computer science principle of "computational irreducibility" sheds light on this compatibility. It implies that there cannot, in general, be shortcuts to predict the behavior of agents, explaining why deterministic agents often appear to act freely. In this paper, we introduce a variant of computational irreducibility that intends to capture more accurately aspects of actual (as opposed to apparent) free agency, including computational sourcehood, i.e., the phenomenon that the successful prediction of a process' behavior must typically involve an almost-exact representation of the relevant features of that process, regardless of the time it takes to arrive at the prediction. We argue that this can be understood as saying that the process itself is the source of its actions, and we conjecture that many computational processes have this property. The main contribution of this paper is technical, in that we analyze whether and how a sensible formal definition of computational sourcehood is possible. While we do not answer the question completely, we show how it is related to finding a particular simulation preorder on Turing machines, we uncover concrete stumbling blocks towards constructing such a definition, and demonstrate that structure-preserving (as opposed to merely simple or efficient) functions between levels of simulation play a crucial role.
ISSN:1099-4300
1099-4300
DOI:10.3390/e25060903