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Towards Implementing Free Will - Bruce Edmonds

7 Co-evolution


The next important step is to situate the above elaborated model of strategy development in a society of competitive peers. The development of free-will only makes sense in such a setting, for if there are not other active entities who might be predicting your action there would be no need for anything other than a reactive cognition. This observations fits in with the hypothesis that our cognitive faculties evolved in our species due to a selective pressure of social origin
[2].

Thus we have a situation where many agents are each evolving their models of their world (including of each other) as well as their strategies. The language that these strategies are limited to must be sufficiently expressive so that it includes strategies such as: attempting to predict another's action and doing the opposite; evaluating the success of other agents and copying the actions of the one that did best; and detecting when another agent is copying one's own actions and using this fact to do what would help you. Thus the language has to have `hooks' that refer to ones own actions as well as to other's past actions and their results.circumstances such as these it has been observed that agents can spontaneously differentiate themselves by specialising in different styles of strategies [5]. It is also not the case that just because these agents are competing that they ignore each other. Such a co-evolution of strategy (when open-ended and resource limited) can result in the intensive use of the actions of others as inputs to their own deliberation, but in a way that is unpredictable to the others [6]. So that the suggested structure for agent free-will can include a high level of social embedding.


Towards Implementing Free Will - Bruce Edmonds - 16 MAR 0
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