title: A Chance for Attributable Agency.
abstract: Can we sensibly attribute some of the happenings in our world to the agency of some of the things around us? We do this all the time, but there are conceptual challenges purporting to show that attributable agency, and specifically one of its most important subspecies, human free agency, is incoherent. We address these challenges in a novel way: rather than merely rebutting specific arguments, we discuss a concrete model that we claim positively illustrates attributable agency in an indeterministic setting. The model, recently introduced by one of the authors in the context of artificial intelligence, shows that an agent with a sufficiently complex memory organization can employ indeterministic happenings in a meaningful way. We claim that these considerations successfully counter arguments against the coherence of libertarian (indeterminism-based) free will.
authors.affiliation: Institut für Theoretische Physik, Universität Innsbruck, Technikerstraße 25, 6020 Innsbruck, Austria ; Institut für Quantenoptik und Quanteninformation der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Otto Hittmair-Platz 1, 6020 Innsbruck, Austria.
authors.forename: Hans J
authors.initials: HJ
authors.lastname: Briegel
authors.affiliation: Department of Philosophy, University of Konstanz, Fach 17, 78457 Konstanz, Germany.
authors.forename: Thomas
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Müller
keywords: Agency; Free will; Indeterminism; Libertarianism; Projective simulation