2025/02/06 by David Abel, André Barreto, Abel, David +30 · 4 voices · 1 citation
Neuroscience · Psychology · #Action Observation and Synchronization #Embodied and Extended Cognition #Free Will and Agency #cs.AI
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2502.04403
openalex publication_date 2025/02/06 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
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.