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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   8492 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026

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If you are defining agency as "non-deterministic behaviour introduced by variations at the level of floating-point math imprecision", just one?

That is not my definition, and I do not see how non-determinism is required at all.

That's the point; it's a bad definition! The fact that you can get different results from an LLM even if you don't deliberately introduce randomness is not evidence that the model has developed agency.

However if I write some (theoretically) deterministic code it seems hard to describe that as having its own agency?

Why? Superdeterminism posits that everything is absolutely determined, including humans. Does this change the human condition? In general I have never seen the link between consciousness, agency, and randomness/unpredictability. I suppose seeing it requires a very practical, utilitarian mindset where a real agent changes the global state on its own, and if the state is evolving according solely to its intrinsic rules, there is no place for agency in the system and no need for the term. I believe that's too depressing a metaphysics. Agents are a class of events we observe inside the universe. They must be be definable, for they are observable, even if their substance is as immaterial as a sunbeam or a shadow. And AI agents just put our folk metaphysics to test.

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