Agency Is Frame-Dependent
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 question: Dennett (1989), for instance, highlights the puzzle of determining which principles can decide whether a rock, a thermostat, or a robot each possess agency. We here address this puzzle from the viewpoint of reinforcement learning by arguing that agency is fundamentally frame-dependent: Any measurement of a system's agency must be made relative to a reference frame. We support this claim by presenting a philosophical argument that each of the essential properties of agency proposed by Barandiaran et al. (2009) and Moreno (2018) are themselves frame-dependent. We conclude that any basic science of agency requires frame-dependence, and discuss the implications of this claim for reinforcement learning.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Tasks
Philosophyreinforcement-learningReinforcement LearningSimilar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Regulating the Agency of LLM-based Agents
As increasingly capable large language model (LLM)-based agents are developed, the potential harms caused by misalignment and loss of control grow correspondingly severe. To address these risks, we propose an approach th…
Artificial Empathy: Towards a Framework for Unsupervised Agency Detection and Policy Reconstruction
We study how an AI system can identify and model other agents in its environment from observation alone, which is a capability necessary for cooperative behaviour in the real world. This problem is less constrained than …
Reinforcement LearningA Quantifiable Information-Processing Hierarchy Provides a Necessary Condition for Detecting Agency
As intelligent systems are developed across diverse substrates - from machine learning models and neuromorphic hardware to in vitro neural cultures - understanding what gives a system agency has become increasingly impor…
From Detecting Agency to Doing Work: Self-Caused Credit Builds a Durable Behavioral Self in a Minimal Spiking Agent
How does an agent that can tell self from world come to be durably shaped by that distinction? Recent work shows that a predictive system can detect its own agency (Ye, 2026), but detecting agency does not explain durabl…
Creativity Reconsidered: Generative AI and the Problem of Intentional Agency
Many theorists maintain that conscious intentional agency is a necessary condition of creativity. We argue that this requirement, which we call the Intentional Agency Condition (IAC), should be abandoned. We motivate thi…