Is Free Will a Necessary Condition for Instrumental Rationality?

A Necessary Condition for Weyl-Heisenberg Frames

Machine free will: is free will a necessary ingredient of machine consciousness?

Sooner or later, machine consciousness will have to address the elusive notion of free will either to dismiss it or to produce a machine implementation. It is unclear whether freedom and consciousness are independent aspects of the human mind or by-product of the same underlying structure. Here, the relevant literature is reviewed focusing on the connection between determinism and freedom-usual...

Harmony and Beauty, Disease and Suffering: Indeterminacy a Necessary Condition for Free Will

The order and harmony of the universe could be much more easily reconciled with the iniquity of nature (incomprehensible natural calamities) if we were to accept without thought that the universe is accidental and not something responding to a deliberate creative project. The exercise of free will, however, is possible only in the presence of a certain measure of indeterminacy, and this necessa...

Instrumental Desires , Instrumental Rationality

The requirements of instrumental rationality are often thought to be normative conditions on choice or intention, but this is a mistake. Instrumental rationality is best understood as a requirement of coherence on an agent's non-instrumental desires and means-end beliefs. Since only a subset of an agent's means-end beliefs concern possible actions, the connection with intention is thus more obl...

Attention is necessary for subliminal instrumental conditioning

The capacity of humans and other animals to provide appropriate responses to stimuli anticipating motivationally significant events is exemplified by instrumental conditioning. Interestingly, in humans instrumental conditioning can occur also for subliminal outcome-predicting stimuli. However, it remains unclear whether attention is necessary for subliminal instrumental conditioning to take pla...