There Is No Agency Without Attention

For decades AI researchers have built agents that are capable of carrying out tasks that require human-level or human-like intelligence. During this time, questions of how these programs compared in kind to humans have surfaced and led to beneficial interdisciplinary discussions, but conceptual progress has been slower than technological progress. Within the past decade, the term agency has taken on new import as intelligent agents have become a noticeable part of our everyday lives. Research on autonomous vehicles and personal assistants has expanded into private industry with new and increasingly capable products surfacing as a matter of routine. This wider use of AI technologies has raised questions about legal and moral agency at the highest levels of government (National Science and Technology Council 2016) and drawn the interest of other academic disciplines and the general public. Within this context, the notion of an intelligent agent in AI is too coarse and in need of refinement. We suggest that the space of AI agents can be subdivided into classes, where each class is defined by an associated degree of control

The Benefits and Costs of Regulatory Reforms for Superfund

The current policy approach used in the Superfund program is a peculiar halfway house. EPA devotes substantial effort to identifying chemicals at a site and ascertaining their potential risks. It also assesses the costs of a range of remedies in considerable detail. However, many key elements are missing in the agency\u27s analyses. There is no explicit consideration of the size of the population at risk. Risks to a single individual have the same weight as risks to a large exposed population. Actual and hypothetical exposures to chemicals receive equal weight so that risks to a person who, in the future, may choose to live near a currently uninhabited Superfund site receive the same weight as risks to large populations that are currently involuntarily exposed.73 EPA also reports the conservative risk assessment value for each site, without focusing its policy attention on the expected risk level or most likely risk scenarios. Finally, explicit tradeoffs that balance benefits and costs do not enter remediation decisions. These problems arise in part because of decision-making constraints in the Superfund legislation and in part because of the manner in which regulators have implemented the program. Our data show that the core economic elements of the proposed regulatory reform bills would dramatically alter EPA\u27s policy choices. Put simply, the reforms would require that agency regulations maximize the net gain to society (benefits less costs) using plausible risk assumptions. Sound risk assessment and benefit-cost analysis would force wiser spending and eliminate many of the problems that decrease the overall performance of those potentially desirable regulatory efforts such as hazardous waste cleanup...Risk reform is inevitably vulnerable to becoming a vehicle for ignoring environmental hazards rather than remediating them more efficiently. As our analysis shows however, there is a wide zone within which risk reforms can improve efficiency without sacrificing human health considerations

Housing for Returning Offenders in the United States

In the United States, individuals returning home from prison face serious obstacles securing affordable, stable housing. Without appropriate housing, applying for jobs, obtaining needed social services, and successfully reintegrating to their communities becomes nearly impossible. Furthermore, a lack of stable housing is a predictor for recidivism and homelessness, which places pressure on municipal budgets. Because no one agency or level of government sees housing for returning offenders as its responsibility, there has been little action on or attention to this problem. In this article, I first review the literature describing the barriers returning offenders face in securing housing, including legal prohibitions, limited family support, and fragmented social service delivery. Then, I examine policy models to address these problems in Washington State, New York City, and Ohio. Based on the results of these programs, I conclude with policy recommendations, including removing barriers to public housing based on past offending, search assistance programs for returning offenders, improving coordination across the criminal justice system and post-release service providers, and revitalizing neighborhoods that support high levels of returning offenders.https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/136592/1/Baccile_HousingForReturningOffendersInTheUnitedStates.pd

The Problem of Mental Action

In mental action there is no motor output to be controlled and no sensory input vector that could be manipulated by bodily movement. It is therefore unclear whether this specific target phenomenon can be accommodated under the predictive processing framework at all, or if the concept of “active inference” can be adapted to this highly relevant explanatory domain. This contribution puts the phenomenon of mental action into explicit focus by introducing a set of novel conceptual instruments and developing a first positive model, concentrating on epistemic mental actions and epistemic self-control. Action initiation is a functionally adequate form of self-deception; mental actions are a specific form of predictive control of effective connectivity, accompanied and possibly even functionally mediated by a conscious “epistemic agent model”. The overall process is aimed at increasing the epistemic value of pre-existing states in the conscious self-model, without causally looping through sensory sheets or using the non-neural body as an instrument for active inference

The Shadow Side of Second-Person Engagement: Sin in Paul’s Letter to the Romans

This paper explores the characteristics of debilitating versus beneficial intersubjective engagements, by discussing the role of sin in the relational constitution of the self in Paul’s letter to the romans. Paul narrates ”sin’ as both a destructive holding environment and an interpersonal agent in a lethal embrace with human beings. The system of self-in-relation-to-sin is transactional, competitive, unidirectional, and domineering, operating implicitly within an economy of lack. Conversely, Paul’s account in romans of the divine action that moves persons into a new identity of self-in-relationship demonstrates genuinely second-personal qualities: it is loving, non-transactional, non- competitive, mutual, and constitutive of personal agency

Is Vision for Action Unconscious?

Empirical work and philosophical analysis have led to widespread acceptance that vision for action, served by the cortical dorsal stream, is unconscious. I argue that the empirical argument for this claim is unsound. That argument relies on subjects’ introspective reports. Yet on biological grounds, in light of the theory of primate cortical vision, introspection has no access to dorsal stream mediated visual states. It is thus wrongly assumed that introspective reports speak to absent phenomenology in the dorsal stream. In light of this, I consider a different conception of consciousness’s relation to agency in terms of access. While theoretical reasons suggest that the inaccessibility of the dorsal stream to conceptual report is evidence that it is unconscious, this position begs important questions. I propose a broader notion of access in respect of the guidance of intentional agency and not, narrowly, conceptual report (Note: this paper contradicts my earlier paper, "The Case for Zombie Agency")

Il senso dell'azione e dell'apparenza corporea nei disturbi funzionali del movimento

Functional Movement Disorders (FMD) are part of the spectrum of functional neurological disorders. Recent research findings implicate three key processes in the pathophysiology of FMD: abnormal attentional focus; abnormal beliefs and expectations; and abnormalities in sense of agency (SoA). These three processes have been combined in a recent neurobiological model of FMD, suggesting that abnormal predictions related to movement are triggered by abnormally focused attention; the resulting movement is generated without the normal sense of agency that accompanies voluntary movement, being the FMD itself felt as involuntary. This gap might be related to altered self-recognition of bodily actions that consists of two fundamental components: the sense of agency (SoA), that is the subjective experience of being in control of own actions and the sense of body ownership (SoBo), that is the feeling of the body as part of the self. Here we investigated whether SoA, SoBo and their relationship are altered in FMD. Differently from previous studies on the implicit component of SoA, we focused on the explicit component of SoA, which more closely resembles the clinically described lack of explicit control of the motor symptom in FMD. With the use of an ad-hoc paradigm (Kalchert e Ehrsson, 2012), based on the rubber hand illusion (RHI). To this porpuse, the first step was to build up a suitable task and test it in. Experiment 1: 13 young participants. We applied three different conditions: active synchronous condition, passive congruent condition and control condition. Namely, subjects gave higher scores to ownership and agency after synchronous than asynchronous movements in the active condition. Moreover we found higher scores of agency after active compared to passive movements. With regards to the proprioceptive drift, however, the data were not clear. Moreover, we realized that there was no way to separate agency from ownership. In particular, there was no 8 condition in which there was only agency without ownership. We decided to add a condition in which the artificial hand was rotated 180\ub0 and therefore in an incongruent position with respect to the subject\u2019s own hand. This creates a sense of agency, but since the two hands are in an incongruent position, the sense of body ownership is not induced. Experiment 2: we applying the paradigm with this additional condition to 24 healthy subjects, we confirmed the previous results and we were also able to separate agency from ownership. Experiment 3: in order to test if the task could be executed also by 4 patients with essential tremor, we recruited and we found that they were able to perform the task, they appeared to have a pattern similar to controls. Experiment 4: twenty-one patients with diagnosis of FMD. The results showed that: synchronous movements determined a strong sense of agency and ownership; passive movements suppressed agency but not ownership; the anatomically implausible position of the rubber hand eliminated ownership but not agency; asynchronous movements abolished both agency and ownership. This pattern of responses suggesting that FMD patients maintain an explicit sense of agency for normal voluntary movements and that the sense of body ownership is preserved. The latter finding is in line with a previous study using the static RHI

Agency in Social Context

Many political philosophers argue that interference threatens a person’s agency. And they cast political freedom in opposition to interpersonal threats to agency, as non-interference. I argue that this approach relies on an inapt model of agency, crucial aspects of which emerge from our relationships with other people. Such relationships involve complex patterns of vulnerability and subjection, essential to our constitution as particular kinds of agents: as owners of property, as members of families, and as participants in a market for labor. We should construct a conception of freedom that targets the structures of our interpersonal relations, and the kinds of agents these relations make us. Such a conception respects the interpersonal foundations of human agency. It also allows us to draw morally significant connections between diverse species of unfreedom—between, for instance, localized domination and structural oppression