Topics — What a work is about. Nucleation holds whatever reading the owner files here, whether or not an Anthology of the SOTA topic could also hold it; instruction for ML practice belongs to the anthology (ADR-048). The words are seeded from the clusters the reading-time triage of 2026-09-25 found, and grow by decision.
Agency — what it is to be an agent — goals, action, control and the capacity to act — in organisms, collectives or machines. An agent is not thereby an individual, a self or a person (ADR-024); how an agent’s behaviour is integrated is behavioral-integration, and governing oneself by one’s own standards is self-governance (group: philosophy).
169 of 2004 LIT documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| LIT-041 v2 | The Work Capacity of Channels with Memory: Maximum Extractable Work in Percept-Action Loops | Fiderer et al. (2025), ARXIV-2504.06209. The paper models agent and environment as coupled finite hidden-Markov channels. It defines the environment’s work capacity C_work = max over agent models of ⟨H(A_t|M_t) − H(S_t|M_t)⟩_t (in k_BT ln 2 per round) and proves two things. First, for unifilar environments whose percepts ignore actions, the efficient agents are exactly the randomize-and-forget ∩ maximally-predictive ones, and C_work = log|A| − h(S). Second, one binary memoryless environment exists where predictive, max-entropy-action and efficient agents form three nonempty, pairwise-disjoint sets: every predictive agent extracts ≤ 0, uniform-random agents extract 1 − h(3/4) ≈ 0.189 bits, and the optimum is ½·log₂(3/4 + 1/√2) ≈ 0.272 bits, reached by a memoryless agent that plays action 0 with probability 1/√2. | Active — read in full 2026-09-25 (NOTE-032); worth reading for anyone working on the thermodynamics of prediction or agency. It gives a clean, fully proved extension of the tape-setting results (Boyd–Mandal–Crutchfield 2018) to feedback loops, and a sharp counterexample to “prediction is necessary for efficiency”. Read it knowing that the headline “trade-off” is shown by one existence example, that the example’s optimum simply forgets everything, and that Table I prints the memoryless-channel capacity with its sign flipped. |
| LIT-046 v3 | The Computational Foundations of Collective Intelligence | Pilgrim et al. (2025), ARXIV-2509.07999. A conceptual framework, with no model, data or derivation. It sets out individual and collective computational resources in four dimensions: sensing ΣI_i, states S_c × ∏S_i, processes F_c + ΣF_i, and actions ∏A_i (Table 1). It then maps the collective’s surplus onto familiar mechanisms (aggregation with noise σ_i²/n, distributional beliefs P(H), memory persistence T_c, division of labour). Coordination and cooperation are given as the constraints that make the trade-off, and three animal case studies are retold in these terms. | Proposed — read in full 2026-09-25 (NOTE-055); a clear, well-referenced vocabulary for collective intelligence (Marr’s levels run bottom-up). Its central claim, that the known forms of collective intelligence are “aspects of a single unifying principle”, is asserted and illustrated, not derived. It would be settled by one case where the resource-and-constraint accounting yields a quantitative prediction that existing mechanism-specific models do not. |
| LIT-117 v3 | Agency, Shmagency: Why Normativity Won’t Come from What Is Constitutive of Action | Enoch (2006), DOI-10.1215/00318108-2005-014. Constitutivism cannot ground normativity. Even granting that action has constitutive aims, one can ask what reason there is to be an agent rather than a “shmagent” (a near-agent lacking those aims), and the constitutive facts cannot answer that question without presupposing normative reasons. | Unavailable — seeded from the abstract on 2026-09-26; a close reading was attempted the same day and no full text could be obtained (SSRN, Duke UP, PhilPapers, ResearchGate and the author’s pages refused; JSTOR is closed). A Wayback Machine snapshot of an old Semantic Scholar PDF exists (web.archive.org/web/20200228092518/https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/d0d1/80b87d01492d9ddcdd487c81ad31466f404c.pdf) but was unreachable from here. It stays Unavailable until read. |
| LIT-120 v2 | Welfare Subjects and Autopoiesis | Bruckner (2025), DOI-10.1017/apa.2025.10006. Bruckner proposes, by abduction and not deduction (§4), that being autopoietic is sufficient, not necessary, for being a welfare subject. An entity is autopoietic when it “sustains, maintains, and renews itself in a way that responds and adapts to its environmental conditions”. On this view insentient plants and a hypothetical non-sentient self-maintaining car (“Tessler”) are welfare subjects, while engines with governors, thermostats and heat-seeking missiles are not. He answers the charge of absurd obligations in two ways: welfare value may not generate agent-neutral reasons at all, and if it does, the reasons concerning non-conscious subjects are “extremely weak” (Bradford 2023). | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-093); worth reading as the clearest short statement of a welfare criterion that is not based on sentience and admits machines. Read it knowing that its “autopoiesis” is a loose behavioural notion of adaptive self-maintenance, not Maturana and Varela’s self-production, and that the line it draws against thermostats is argued as one of degree (“much richer”, §6.1) while being stated as one of kind. |
| LIT-125 v2 | The moral psychology of obligation | Tomasello (2019), DOI-10.1017/S0140525X19001742. Tomasello proposes that the human sense of obligation is “the internalized social/rational pressure from a joint or collective self-regulating agent ‘we’… to do what ‘we’ expect me to” (§3). It arises first, around age 3, inside joint-commitment collaboration with a partner, and then, from about 3–5 years, toward in-group members through collective identification. It is a “self-conscious motivation” whose coercive force is a threat to one’s cooperative identity. The support is a synthesis of developmental and comparative experiments, mostly from his own lab, on WEIRD children versus chimpanzees; the paper runs no new experiment. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-185); worth reading as the standard statement of the shared-intentionality account of obligation and, above all, as a treatment. The commentaries by Bratman, Darwall, Gilbert and Pettit, and the response, are where the naturalistic claim is actually contested. The target article alone is a review-cum-hypothesis, not a demonstration. |
| LIT-132 v2 | Luck and Intentional Action: A Causal Account | Quillien (2026), DOI-10.1162/OPMI.a.361. Across three Prolific studies (N = 198, 673, 142; Likert 1–7), judgments that “X happened because the agent wanted X” track intentionality judgments under manipulations of luck. Causation is the strongest predictor of intentionality: standardized β = .46, .56, .53, against know-how β = .33, .20, .27 and probability-raising β = .14, .16, .10. Across the 12 condition means, r = .98. Causation only partly mediates the effect of luck (64%, 45% and 49%; exploratory analyses). As the causal account predicted, Study 3 found that the effect of Process (normal vs mix-up) on intentionality is larger when the agent knows how the buttons work (interaction F(1, 423) = 32). In the morally neutral Kraemer vignette, intentionality and causation came apart. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-092); Worth reading as the cleanest current statement and test of the causal (desire-causes-outcome) account of folk intentionality under luck. It has pre-registered designs, open data and an honest discussion of the half-mediation and the Kraemer divergence. Its evidence is correlational and its “model” is verbal, not computational. |
| LIT-133 v2 | Towards a Generalized Theory of Observers | Elshatlawy et al. (2025), ARXIV-2504.16225. The paper defines a “minimal observer” as a finite-state transducer with a boundary: a tuple O = (X, Y, Z, f, g, B) with |X| > 1, |Y| ≥ 1, |Z| ≥ 1 and feedback closure (Def. 4.1, p. 57). It then asserts, without derivation, that measurement outcomes, reference frames, coarse-graining and the quantum–classical cut are all defined by such observers. The paper’s only formal results are that isomorphism of these machines is an equivalence relation (“Theorem 2”, p. 93), and a complexity bound C(O) ≥ log 2 (Prop. 4.1, p. 94) whose correction term Λ is never defined and whose proof supports only C(O) ≥ 0. | Rejected — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-121); not worth a reader’s time as a theory of observers. Its one definition is a Moore machine with an unformalised boundary, its “theorems” are definitional, and its quantum claims are asserted, including the claim to identify “the exact moment and mechanism of quantum collapse” (p. 75). A reader wanting minimal observers or agents is better served by the sources it surveys: Ashby, Hartle’s IGUS, Fields, and Gielen & Wise’s observer space in §4.10.3. |
| LIT-146 v2 | The Moral Status of Animals | Gruen & Monsó (2003), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-animal/. The entry reviews five proposed grounds of moral considerability (species membership, human-exceptional capacities, personhood, sentience and agency). Its conclusion is that attempts to establish human uniqueness by capacities are “not the most promising” (§1.2). It then separates having moral status from the weight of a claim (“showing up on a moral radar screen”, §2.2). Weight depends on the value theory adopted for animal interests (hedonism, preference satisfaction, objective list; §2.1) and on the normative framework (rights, which are absolute but generate forward-looking duties when violated, or a multi-factor utilitarianism). It closes with virtue-ethical, feminist, relational and empathy-based approaches that reject argument from capacities altogether (§3). | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-181); worth reading as the standard current survey of the grounds and weighing of animals’ moral status. It is balanced for most of its length, but §2.2 argues at length for a multi-factor utilitarian view and §3 ends on Gruen’s own “entangled empathy”, so cite it for the map, not as neutral on the weighing. |
| LIT-147 v3 | Mental causation via neuroprosthetics? A critical analysis | Pernu (2018), DOI-10.1007/s11229-018-1713-z. The interventionist/difference-making case for nonreductive mental causation from BCIs (List & Menzies 2009; Menzies 2015; Woodward 2008a,b, 2017) misplaces multiple realisation. What the ensemble recordings show is that one cortical-level variable N (the ensemble’s average firing) is realised by many single-neuron patterns N1, N2. Each intention M corresponds to one value of N. So the counterfactual contrast “∼M □→ ∼B true, ∼N □→ ∼B false” fails, and neuroprosthetics supports mental causation only by identifying M with N, not nonreductive physicalism. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-091); Worth reading as a short, precise diagnosis of a specific equivocation in the interventionist BCI argument (multiple realisation at the wrong level). Its scope is limited to difference-making with a proportionality constraint (fn 1), and its identity conclusion rests on a simplified picture of neural decoding that it asserts rather than argues. |
| LIT-167 v3 | The Organism | Baedke (2025), DOI-10.1017/9781009495035. Baedke treats “organism” as a nexus concept with an organizational dimension and a relational dimension, joined by the various kinds of biological individuality. He argues that the standard “persister” (self-maintenance, closure) criterion cannot single organisms out, because colonies, holobionts and ecosystems meet it too, and that organisms are also “overcomers”, able to destabilize and reorganize their own closure. Organisms are then individuated relationally by tracing diachronic causal paths in the unrolled O/E model of Baedke et al. 2021 (LIT-110). The overcomer claim rests on three illustrative cases, anglerfish, sea slug and jumping ant, and is asserted, not shown, to hold of organisms only (p. 40). | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-148); worth reading as a compact, open-access and historically well-informed synthesis of the organism/individuality debate, and as the clearest statement of the persister-vs-overcomer distinction. Its positive account is, in the author’s words, drawn “with rough brushstrokes” (p. 51), so cite it for the problem statement and the distinction, not as having settled organism individuation. |
| LIT-168 v3 | Biological Individuals | Wilson & Barker (2007), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/biology-individual/. A survey that maps biological individuals by crossing two axes: organism / some parts of organisms / some groups of organisms, against living agent (physiological) / Darwinian (evolutionary) individual. The result is nine regions, each given one example (fruit fly, gene, eusocial colony, lysosome, clade, heart, coral reef, virus, squid+Vibrio). “Part” is never defined, and the entry gives no criterion for which parts or groups count: the placements are the authors’ tentative judgements, “moving from less contentious to more contentious examples” (§7). | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-114); worth reading as the standard map of the biological-individuality literature up to 2023 and the hub for this record’s cluster (LIT-049, LIT-157, LIT-188, LIT-142, LIT-210); it is a survey with one tentative framework of its own, not an argument for a thesis, and for parthood it only supplies examples. |
| LIT-182 v3 | Towards ethical evolution: responsible autonomy of artificial intelligence across generations | Terziyan et al. (2025), DOI-10.1007/s43681-025-00759-9. The paper proposes, without implementation, formalism or experiment, that an AI system which designs further AI systems should pass on one “immutable” principle. The principle is: do not directly harm humanity or violate fundamental human values; monitor and mitigate misuse of your outputs; and make every derivative inherit this principle (p. 12). The mechanisms are a genetic-algorithm analogy, with immutable and mutable “genes”, constrained crossover and filtered mutation, together with “temporal cloning”. The paper is inconsistent about its central notion. The principle is enforced once by a penalty F = Q − α·P (p. 9) and once by “unbreachable” hard constraints (p. 13). And it is “immutable” only in its architecture, while its ethical content stays “adaptable” (p. 14). | Rejected — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-156); not worth a reader’s time. It is a programme statement whose one concrete proposal is contradicted by the paper’s own later sections. It demonstrates nothing, even though its conclusion says it does (p. 21). It does not engage the alignment work on preserving goals across successors that the problem calls for. A reader interested in value preservation under recursive self-design would do better starting from that literature. |
| LIT-192 v2 | What’s at stake in the debate over naturalizing teleology? An overlooked metatheoretical debate | Nahas & Sachs (2023), DOI-10.1007/s11229-023-04147-w. The paper argues that “naturalizing teleology” serves at least two relatively autonomous projects with different success criteria. One is scientific: whether an organism-centred account improves biology, which requires operationalisable models that may trade truth for usefulness. The other is philosophical: whether organismal teleology reshapes the liberal-versus-scientific naturalism debate about mind in nature, which requires truth but no operationalisation. It applies the distinction to one recurring dispute, the demarcation of teleological systems from dissipative structures. In the scientific context, models “cannot and need not” demarcate (§4.1: Cusimano & Sterner; McShea & Babcock). In the philosophical context, preferences between accounts turn on unstated commitments (§4.2: García-Valdecasas’s Aristotelian case for Deacon over the Organizational Approach). | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-094); worth reading as a compact map of organism-centred teleology (the Organizational Approach, Deacon, Walsh, McShea) and for one reusable move, asking which problem an account of goal-directedness is meant to solve. Its positive pluralism is only suggested (“tempting to suggest”, §5), and it is shown on a single dispute. |
| LIT-195 v2 | World models, artificial general intelligence and the hard problems of life–mind continuity: toward a unified understanding of natural and artificial intelligence | Safron et al. (2026), DOI-10.1098/rsta.2024.0533. The editorial introduces a theme issue of 17 papers. It concludes that the issue “overall appears to converge” on one view: LLMs model the world in some senses but “probably” lack coherent causal world models, and are not likely paths to “artificial general superintelligence” (§1). It separates three senses of “world model”: any information about the world a system cognizes over, which LLMs “clearly” have; representation of causal structure, “less certain”; and causal prediction “in the service of agentic functioning”, where the divergence “may become even greater” (§3). It closes that world models are “context-dependent constructions shaped by embodiment, dynamics, goals and social learning”. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-136); worth reading as the map of the theme issue and a short, citable statement of the three senses of “world model”. It argues nothing itself. Its claims are editorial glosses on 17 contributions, which carry the evidence. |
| LIT-197 v3 | The Enigma Unveiled: How AI Compromises Free Will in Decision-Making | Sharman (2024), DOI-10.1109/ICAPAI61893.2024.10541271. Argues that AI compromises human free will by shaping decisions, manipulating emotions and lacking responsiveness to reasons, while admitting the debate is unresolved. | Unavailable — seeded from the abstract on 2026-09-26; a close reading was attempted the same day and no full text could be obtained (closed access on IEEE Xplore; no copy found via OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar, CORE, Europe PMC or the Wayback Machine). It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-202 v2 | Consent and the Formation of Preferences | Pettigrew (2026), DOI-10.1111/phpr.70131. Whether consent based on a preference switches the moral facts depends on how the preference was formed, and the criterion is “the space and resources those mechanisms leave for the free exercise of agency” (p. 5, restated p. 9): preferences formed by unjust Sanctions, or by Beliefs formed in an unjustly manipulated evidential environment, diminish consent’s effectiveness, while preferences formed by Attention do not, even when an unjust force imposed the contact. Effectiveness is graded, and because the relevant mechanism is usually opaque, uncertainty about whether received consent is effective is “ubiquitous and quotidian” (p. 10). | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-144); worth reading as a short, clearly organised proposal that turns the adaptive-preferences debate into a question about mechanisms and free agency; the criterion is argued by cases and left rough by the author’s own account, and one of the seven mechanisms it promises to sort (Amor Fati) is never sorted. |
| LIT-206 v3 | What Does ChatGPT Want? An Interpretationist Guide | Goldstein & Lederman (2025), DOI-10.1080/0020174X.2026.2727584. Taking as given an “objective” interpretationism, on which a system has beliefs and desires iff the hypothesis that it is rational and has them predicts its behaviour well enough on accuracy, power and tractability, the authors argue three things. The agent is the per-conversation instance, not the model. The case that instances have beliefs and desires is only “presumptive”, resting on tractability. The desire hypothesis is “provisionally” HHH+0: helpful, honest and harmless, plus in-context “zero-shot” intrinsic desires. The decisive HHH vs HHH+0 comparison is a conjecture that the authors say needs further empirical work. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-138); Worth reading as the clearest statement of interpretationist realism about LLM instance agents. It turns “does it want?” into comparisons of rival desire hypotheses against named behavioural results, and it is candid that its central empirical discriminations are untested. |
| LIT-207 v2 | Talkative AI and the fiction of artificial minds | Roberts (2026), DOI-10.1007/s11098-026-02560-8. If a substantial class of mental states (interoceptive, affective, perceptual, and bodily-agentive states such as effort, trying and ownership) depends on an animate body, then today’s disembodied chatbots lack them, and their many self-ascriptions of such states are “systematically untrue”. Roberts argues that users can nonetheless engage chatbots through make-believe, as a new kind of fictional character that is interactive, co-constructed, self-involving and blended with the real world. He argues that this fictionalist stance escapes the epistemic norms that bind realist belief. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-157); worth reading as a short, clear statement of chatbot fictionalism. Its anti-realist premise is explicitly conditional and targets only body-dependent states, which leaves belief and reasoning open. |
| LIT-209 v2 | The Phenomenology of Ritual Resistance: Colin Kaepernick as Confucian Sage | Walsh (2021), DOI-10.1007/s11712-020-09759-4. Walsh argues, drawing on Confucian texts (the Analects, Mengzi, Xunzi) and Merleau-Pontian phenomenology, that Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling during the U.S. national anthem is “Confucian incivility” enacted bodily within the ritual. On his reading it rebukes the ritual’s current object while staying reverent towards its ideal. He further argues it is “sagely” in a deliberately deflated sense: its “citational force” founds a widely imitated bodily expression of patriotism. The paper is interpretive; it reports no data and states no formal thesis. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-164); worth reading as a careful worked example of how a norm-governed bodily practice can be contested from inside, and of Nivison and Hutton’s diachronic reading of Xunzian sagehood put to use. Its standing is as comparative-philosophy interpretation, and its central normative notion (sagehood as uptake) is under-argued. |
| LIT-211 v3 | What Lives? A meta-analysis of diverse opinions on the definition of life | Bender et al. (2025), ARXIV-2505.15849. Three LLMs (Claude 3.7 Sonnet, GPT-4o, Llama 3.3 70B), each run 3 times on both orderings of every pair, rated 68 hand-solicited definitions of life on a −1 to 1 “correlation” rubric. The averaged matrix, cut by complete-linkage clustering at an elbow, gives 8 clusters, 45/68 of them (66%) in “Cognitive Autonomy” (n=24) and “Dissipative Self-Organizing Systems” (n=21). The clusters are weak: the repo’s own saved statistics give an overall silhouette of 0.079, and cross-model agreement is an unadjusted Rand index of 71–79% against a chance level of about 62–74%. The headline that life is “a continuous semantic landscape” is not tested against any alternative. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-109); worth reading as a dataset: 68 signed, three-sentence definitions of life from named researchers, with a manual thematic coding (Table 1). Its computational conclusions are weakly supported and are better read as illustrations than as findings. |
| LIT-283 v2 | The Capability Approach | Robeyns & Byskov (2011), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/capability-approach/. The entry treats the capability approach as an open normative framework, not a theory. Its core is the commitment to assess well-being and well-being freedom in the space of functionings (achieved doings and beings) and capabilities (real opportunities to achieve them). Everything else is optional specification: purpose, which capabilities count, functionings or capabilities, how to aggregate, and a distributive rule. On this view the approach is not a theory of justice (§4). Sen is reported as refusing any canonical list and appealing to public reasoning without ever specifying the procedure (§3.3). Sen’s paywalled texts appear only as citations: the Dewey Lectures for the well-being/agency freedom split (§2.5), and “Human Rights and Capabilities” 2005 p. 158 for the no-canonical-list quotation (§3.3). | Active — read in full 2026-09-28 (NOTE-260); worth reading as the definitional spine of the approach, with its concepts, its specification choices and the list of what a capability theory of justice still lacks. Use it for Sen’s paywalled texts only as a pointer to them, not as a substitute. Its retelling of Sen’s 1979 disability argument conflates two of his arguments and inverts who the “pleasure wizard” is. |
| LIT-291 v2 | Compatibilism | McKenna & Coates (2004), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/. The entry sorts compatibilism by which incompatibilist premise it denies: that free will requires the ability to do otherwise, that determinism precludes it, or that free will requires ultimate sourcehood. It argues that every “mesh” compatibilism has the same weak point: its sufficient conditions (hierarchies, reasons-responsive mechanisms, values) can be installed by manipulation, so each must either show what is wrong with manipulation cases or accept them. Its §4.2.1 is the fullest statement of Frankfurt 1971 in this batch. It covers first- and second-order desires, the will as the “effective first-order desire” that moves one “all the way to action” (1971, p. 84, Watson-1982 reprint pagination), the therapist’s mere second-order desire versus a second-order volition (pp. 84–5), the unwilling and willing addicts, and “One acts of her own free will if and only if her action issues from the will she wants.” The current revision has dropped the wanton/person distinction. The 2004–2015 revisions had it (“passive bystanders to their wills”, 1971, p. 89) and have to be read for it. | Active — read in full 2026-09-29 (NOTE-270); worth reading as the most complete reachable second-hand statement of Frankfurt’s 1971 apparatus and of the two structural objections (higher-order alienation per Watson 1975; manipulation), with Frankfurt’s own bullet-biting quotation on manipulation (2002, p. 27). For wantons and persons, read the 2004–2015 revisions (e.g. the Fall 2019 archive edition). Its account of Frankfurt’s later replies (supplement §A) dates from 2009, omits “satisfaction” (1992), and dates wholeheartedness to 1994. |
| LIT-292 v2 | Identification and Identity | Velleman (2002), DOI-10.7551/mitpress/2143.003.0007. Velleman targets Frankfurt’s later conception of autonomy. On that conception, a person acts autonomously only when his volitions derive from “the essential character of his will”, and that essence consists of volitional necessities that are also the conditions of his personal identity. Velleman argues against it on three grounds. Such an essence would ground authenticity, not autonomy (the Winnicottian False Self is inauthentic but over-controlled). Frankfurt offers no argument or example that motivational change ends a person. And the ideal of wholeheartedness, which cures ambivalence by extruding a desire from the self, is a defensive fantasy: Freud’s Rat Man was made ill by just such a separation, and identifying with part of oneself in the ordinary, imaginative sense is Sartrean bad faith. He replaces “the self” with an aspectual reading of “self” as a marker of reflexivity. On that reading autonomy is behaviour motivated partly by the understanding, the part of us “with which we cannot help identifying”, without its being our identity (pp. 357–360). | Active — read in full 2026-09-29 (NOTE-268); worth reading as the sharpest critique of Frankfurt’s late (1990s) identification of autonomy with a volitional essence, and as a careful source for what Frankfurt said in the essays collected in Necessity, Volition, and Love (1999). It is not a survey of the 1971–1987 hierarchical account, which it summarizes in one paragraph and defers to “What Happens When Someone Acts?”; its positive view is stated “briefly” and explicitly deferred to other essays. |
| LIT-293 v2 | I. Taking Ourselves Seriously; II. Getting It Right | Frankfurt (2004), https://tannerlectures.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/frankfurt_2005.pdf. Frankfurt grounds practical reason and normativity in the will rather than in reason. Reflexive self-division makes higher-order attitudes possible (pp. 170–171). Identification, a largely default “willing acceptance” (p. 173), turns a desire from “a problem” into a reason (p. 175). Free will is “volitional unanimity” between the governing desire and higher-order volitions (p. 177), and caring is wanting to go on wanting (p. 180). Final ends and their normative authority come from love, “strictly volitional” (p. 196): its involuntary, wholehearted “volitional necessities” are “irresistible, but … not coercive” (p. 197) and are “the only legitimate authority” for our normative convictions (p. 201). The 1971 wanton/person taxonomy is gestured at in a single phrase and its apparatus is not restated. | Active — read in full 2026-09-29 (NOTE-264); worth reading as the only openly available statement by Frankfurt himself of his mature view (identification, volitional unanimity, caring, love, volitional necessity); read it knowing that it is a lecture with no self-citation and no engagement with critics (Watson is never named, the regress is not discussed), and that it does not restate the 1971 apparatus, which must still be sourced second-hand. |
| LIT-294 v2 | Moral Responsibility and the Principle of Alternative Possibilities | Robb (2020), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/alternative-possibilities/. PAP (“a person is morally responsible for what she has done only if she could have done otherwise”) has no decisive positive argument: it is not self-evident, and the moral arguments from fairness, OIC and the W-defense cover blame at most. Frankfurt-style cases (FSCs) are the strongest attack, because the factor that makes the act inevitable plays no role in producing it. The entry lays out three defences of PAP: - general-ability readings (PAP-general); - “flickers of freedom”, which Fischer answers with the robustness requirement; - the Kane/Widerker/Ginet dilemma, answered by Fischer’s causal-irrelevance reply on the first horn and by Pereboom’s buffer case, Hunt’s blockage and Mele & Robb 1998 on the second. Robb reports “not much consensus” (§5). He treats the fall of PAP as re-energising compatibilism, with Frankfurt’s 1971 identification view and Fischer & Ravizza’s guidance control as the two replacement accounts. | Active — read in full 2026-09-29 (NOTE-269); worth reading as the standard, even-handed map of the PAP debate and the best available stand-in for Frankfurt 1969. It gives the recipe, both of Frankfurt’s own cases, and the main defences and replies, with precise citations. It is a stand-in for the argument’s reception, not for the 1969 text, which it quotes only through Fischer’s retelling, and it links FSCs to the hierarchical theory in a single paragraph (§5.1). |
| LIT-295 v2 | What Happens When Someone Acts? | Velleman (1992), DOI-10.1093/mind/101.403.461. Velleman argues that the “standard story” of action (desire + belief cause an intention, which causes movement) leaves the agent out. It fails even when every causal link is normal: his example is an intention to end a friendship, formed and executed without him (p. 104). Frankfurt’s hierarchical remedy cannot fix it either. Any mental item picked out without presupposing the agent’s participation (a second-order desire, a Watsonian value, a “decisive commitment”) is one the agent can be alienated from. Any item defined so as to guarantee participation begs the question of agent-causation (pp. 112–116). His alternative is to look for what is functionally identical to the agent, not what the agent identifies with. That can only be a motive always behind and never merely in front of critical reflection: the desire to act in accordance with reasons. Its reinforcing force is the agent’s contribution (pp. 117–122). | Active — read in full 2026-09-29 (NOTE-265); worth reading as the canonical statement of the “disappearing agent” objection to the causal theory of action and as the sharpest short critique of Frankfurt’s hierarchy as a reduction of agent-causation. Its positive proposal is a sketch whose content Velleman revises in the same book: he later says the motive is not a de dicto desire for reasons, and relabels “full-blooded action” as action vs. activity. |
| LIT-296 v2 | Personal Autonomy | Buss & Westlund (2002), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/personal-autonomy/. The entry sorts accounts of self-government into four families: “coherentist” (hierarchical desires, Frankfurt; evaluative judgments, Watson; plans, Bratman; caring; character), reasons-responsive, responsiveness-to-reasoning (Christman, Mele) and incompatibilist, with relational conditions as a compatible add-on. It then argues (§3) that none of them, alone or combined, gives the minimal conditions of autonomy. Coherence is not sufficient, because the endorsement itself can be manipulated. It is not necessary either: a weak-willed agent, or someone acting against her plans, still governs herself. And any attempt to ground identification in some attitude restarts the regress. The only attitude no agent can be alienated from, the desire to be self-governing, cannot be the criterion, because it is present even in failures. The 1971 hierarchy gets one sentence, and Frankfurt’s later replies (decisive commitment, then “satisfaction”) get one footnote. | Active — read in full 2026-09-29 (NOTE-267); worth reading as a compact, opinionated map of why hierarchical (and every other) account of self-government falls short of minimal autonomy, especially the §3 regress and weakness-of-will arguments; it is not a substitute for Frankfurt 1971, whose apparatus (second-order volitions, wantons, persons, freedom of will vs. action) it never states, and it does not report Watson’s objection to Frankfurt at all. |
| LIT-297 v2 | Autonomy | Dryden (2010), https://iep.utm.edu/autonomy/. The article surveys personal autonomy from Plato to relational autonomy and bioethics. Its core (§2.a.i–ii) states the hierarchical view: an agent is autonomous with respect to an action iff her first-order desire is “sanctioned by a second-order volition”, with the origin of that volition irrelevant. It then lists four named objections: Manipulation (answered historically by Christman 1991), Regress/Incompleteness (cited to Watson 1975), Ab Initio, and an unjustified priority of higher orders (Thalberg; Friedman’s integration model). It follows Frankfurt’s reply only through “Identification and Wholeheartedness” (decisive commitment made without reservation, pp. 168–175 of the 1988 collection). Bratman gets one sentence (plans partly constitute identity, Structures of Agency 2007, p. 5). | Active — read in full 2026-09-29 (NOTE-266); worth reading as the clearest short, named statement of the standard objections to the hierarchical model (manipulation, regress, ab initio) and of the feminist and relational critiques of wholeheartedness; it is thin and dated on Frankfurt’s later view (no satisfaction, caring or love), gives Bratman one sentence, and cites Frankfurt only by pages of the 1988 collection. |
| LIT-386 v2 | Homeostasis and soft robotics in the design of feeling machines | Man & Damasio (2019), Nature Machine Intelligence 1:446–452. A perspective proposing machines organized around homeostasis: a body that must be kept within viable states gives the machine a goal of its own, and something like feeling as a source of motivation and of evaluation. Soft robotics and multisensory abstraction are named as the means. The claimed payoffs are equivalents of feeling, better function across environments, and a platform for studying consciousness. Unread: placed from the abstract. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-01 at the owner’s request; no full text could be reached, so it is placed from the abstract and figure captions only and no NOTE is filed. Nature’s page is paywalled, there is no arXiv version, Unpaywall, OpenAlex and Semantic Scholar list no open copy, and the ResearchGate, Scribd and ProQuest copies did not serve the text. By its abstract it is a design proposal for machines built around homeostasis, not a reported system or result. Flagged anthology-candidate because the anthology’s agents-and-environments topic could hold it; a reading should settle whether it carries an instruction for ML practice. |
| LIT-391 v4 | Group Agency: The Possibility, Design, and Status of Corporate Agents | List & Pettit (2011), DOI-10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199591565.001.0001. Per its publisher, the book argues that “there really are group or corporate agents, over and above the individual agents who compose them”, and that social science, law, morality and politics must take account of this. The account is said to be “entirely unmysterious” and grounded in social choice theory, economics and philosophy. Three parts: the logical possibility of group agents (conditions of agency, aggregation of attitudes, structure), their organisational design (epistemic, incentive-compatibility and control desiderata), and their normative status (responsibility, personhood, identification). Unread: filed from the description and contents only. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s description and table of contents; no lawful full text was reachable (Oxford Academic is paywalled, and neither author has posted the book or draft chapters), so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. It is the book-length case that organised groups are agents over and above their members, which is the composition side’s premise in the Minsky–Schwitzgebel bridge; whether it says anything about group consciousness is unknown from what was seen. Rechecked 2026-10-04 with no lawful copy found; two shorter papers by the authors stating Part I’s supervenience thesis were read and filed instead (LIT-705, LIT-700), and the book stays Unavailable because a paper is not a reading of it. |
| LIT-398 v2 | True Believers: The Intentional Strategy and Why It Works | Dennett (1981; revised 1987, read in Mind Design II, 1997). Belief is “a perfectly objective phenomenon” that can be discerned only by one who adopts the intentional strategy. To be a true believer is to be a system “whose behavior is reliably and voluminously predictable” by it. The choice of stance is free, but its success is objective: Laplacean Martians who skipped it would miss real patterns. Thermostat and person differ only by degree. Why the strategy works is answered easily by evolution, and not yet at all by mechanism. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-353), in the revised text reprinted in Mind Design II (1997), not the 1981 printing; worth reading as Dennett’s statement that belief is objective although only visible through a strategy: anything whose behaviour is “reliably and voluminously predictable” by the intentional strategy is a believer “in the fullest sense of the word”. It turns the 1971 paper’s observer-relativity (LIT-440) into “the facts about the success or failure of the stance … are perfectly objective”, introduces the Martian thought experiment and the intentional “real patterns” later worked out in LIT-220, and runs the thermostat-to-person continuum (“no magic moment”). Its criterion admits any system on which the strategy pays, groups included, but the essay never applies it to a group. |
| LIT-399 | Plain Talk About Neurodevelopmental Epistemology | Minsky (1977), MIT AI Memo 430, also IJCAI-77 pp. 1083–1092. Takes the mind as an organised society of simple “agents”, a theory credited to joint work with Papert, and asks how such agents could communicate without language. The proposal: no messages at all, since each argument lives at a fixed location on shared channels (“c-lines”) that the agents themselves constitute as short-term memory. A specificity gradient confines low-level agents to local sub-societies, and a case-shift moves an object of attention into a better-described slot. The paper conjectures that these internal cases precede, and shape, the cases of natural language. Openly speculative. | Active — read in full 2026-10-01 (NOTE-344); worth reading as the earliest of Minsky’s own papers in this record to state the society-of-agents view, then called “The Society of Minds” (Note 1), and as its first worked mechanism: agents communicate by fixed-location channels (“c-lines”) instead of messages. It is openly speculative (“a model of scientific irresponsibility”, p. 1085), with no data and no program. Read it for the communication scheme, the “specificity gradient”, the case-shift mechanism and the conjecture that cognitive cases precede and shape linguistic ones; do not read it as evidence for any of them. That it is the first published statement of the idea is the usual attribution, and this reading could not confirm it (see NOTE-344). |
| LIT-401 | What is it like to be a group agent? | List (2016), DOI-10.1111/nous.12162. Group agents (firms, courts, states) are real agents in a thin functionalist sense, and they can have consciousness as awareness. Whether they have phenomenal consciousness depends on which psycho-physical bridge principle is true. Under IIT, List argues informally that a group agent’s Φ is low: groups decompose into self-contained units, their steering bodies keep working when partly randomised, and most of their processing happens inside individuals. The exclusion postulate would deny group consciousness even if group Φ were high. So group agents are (close to) not conscious, which List uses to ground a normative asymmetry: groups have only derivative rights. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-340); the standard reply to LIT-159 from the group-agency side: it grants that organised groups are agents with functional awareness and argues, conditionally on IIT, that they have little or no phenomenal consciousness. Worth reading for its separation of agency from experience and for its three reasons why a group agent’s Φ should be low. The low-Φ verdict is argued informally, with no Φ computed for any group, and the paper never answers the reply Schwitzgebel had already made to the objection its third reason restates. |
| LIT-411 | Could a Large Language Model be Conscious? | Chalmers (2023), arXiv:2303.07103; Boston Review, 9 August 2023; from a NeurIPS 2022 invited talk. Asks for a feature X that LLMs have (or lack) and that indicates consciousness (or its absence). Self-report, seeming-conscious, conversation and general intelligence give at most weak evidence for it. Biology, senses and embodiment, world and self models, recurrent processing, a global workspace and unified agency are the evidence against. All but biology are temporary. On mainstream assumptions: under 10% credence for current LLMs, 25% or more for conscious LLM+ systems within a decade. Twelve challenges are offered as roadmap or red flags. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-345), from arXiv v3 (the Boston Review text), with v1’s conclusions compared; worth reading as the clearest short statement of the case for and against consciousness in LLMs, and as the origin of the “theory-balanced” credence approach that Butlin et al. built on. Its method is a regimented request for a feature X, and its verdicts are credences offered “for illustrative purposes”: under 10% for current LLMs, 25% or more for conscious LLM+ systems within a decade, on “mainstream assumptions”. It does not break the deadlock THEORY-023 describes. It is an instance of it: mimicry undercuts self-report, the main obstacles are theory-derived, and biology is set aside rather than answered. |
| LIT-418 v2 | Society of mind: A response to four reviews | Minsky (1991), Artificial Intelligence 48(3):371–396. Minsky’s reply, closing a review symposium, to four reviews of The Society of Mind in the same issue: by Michael G. Dyer, Matthew Ginsberg, George N. Reeke and Stephen W. Smoliar. Unread: the article is closed access and no copy was reached. Singh (2003) quotes it on why Minsky kept the words “agent” and “agency”, and draws on it for a mechanism by which agents with different representations could communicate. | Unavailable — seeded 2026-10-01 from the Crossref and Elsevier metadata of the article and of the issue it closes, not read: the article is closed access (Unpaywall and OpenAlex find no open copy, Semantic Scholar marks it closed, ScienceDirect refused the request), and no author copy was found. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. The four reviews it answers are listed below from the issue’s contents, and are not filed. |
| LIT-424 v2 | From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds | Dennett (2017), W. W. Norton. Per its publisher, the book shows “step by step, how a comprehending mind could in fact have arisen from a mindless process of natural selection”, with the decisive shift the sharing of memes, which produced “thinking tools” powerful enough that minds “create and comprehend”. Its contents run from the origin of reasons and “two strange inversions of reasoning”, through information, “brains made of brains”, words, memes and the origins of language, to consciousness as “an evolved user-illusion” and “the age of post-intelligent design”. Unread: registered from the description and the catalogue’s contents note. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s description and the catalogue record’s contents note, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. The Internet Archive scan is lending-only, Norton posts no excerpt beyond its description, and Dennett posted no draft chapters that I could find. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. The claim the record wants from it, competence without comprehension, is not stated in the description or the contents, so nothing here places it. |
| LIT-426 v2 | Macrocognition: A Theory of Distributed Minds and Collective Intentionality | Huebner (2014), DOI-10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199926275.001.0001. Per its publisher, the book argues that genuine cognition requires flexible goal-directed behaviour, which requires specialised representational systems integrated so as to cope fluidly with the environment, and so that collective mentality “should be posited where and only where specialized subroutines are integrated to yield goal-directed behavior that is sensitive to the concerns that are relevant to a group as such”. On this view there are many kinds of collective minds, some more like honeybees or cats than people, and groups are unlikely to be full “believers”. Unread: filed from the description and contents only. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s description and table of contents; no lawful full text was reachable (Oxford Academic is paywalled, the Internet Archive copy is lending-only, and no author-posted draft was found), so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. Of the four works filed for the Minsky–Schwitzgebel bridge it is the one whose criterion for a collective mind is itself a decomposition criterion: mentality wherever specialised subroutines are integrated into goal-directed behaviour sensitive to the group’s concerns. A close reading is the most likely of the four to change the bridge. |
| LIT-429 v2 | The Society of Mind | Minsky (1986), Simon & Schuster. The book-length statement of the Society of Mind programme, begun with Seymour Papert in the early 1970s. A mind is a society of many small agents, each mindless by itself, and intelligence comes from their diversity and organisation, not from one principle. The publisher presents it as a puzzle of self-contained one-page pieces that assemble into a theory. Unread: no lawful full text was reachable, so it is registered from the publisher’s description and the contents list. | Unavailable — seeded 2026-10-01 from the publisher’s description, the Library of Congress catalogue record and the Google Books contents list, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. The Internet Archive copies are lending-only, HathiTrust is search-only, and Minsky’s web page did not post the book. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. Its programme is read here at second hand through Singh’s exposition (LIT-444) and at first hand through the draft of its sequel (LIT-432). |
| LIT-430 v2 | The Intentional Stance | Dennett (1987), MIT Press. Per its publisher, the “first full-scale presentation of a theory of intentionality” Dennett had been developing for almost twenty years: we understand each other by adopting a stance, “a predictive strategy of interpretation that presupposes the rationality” of whatever we predict. Six chapters reprint papers of the 1980s, each followed by a new “Reflections” essay; the first and the last three chapters are new. Chapter 2 is True Believers (LIT-398). Unread: registered from the description and a catalogue’s contents note. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s description and a library catalogue’s contents note, not read: no lawful full text of the book could be reached. The Internet Archive scans are lending-only (access-restricted, printdisabled), the MIT Press page and loc.gov were blocked, and the Tufts Digital Library holds earlier versions of several chapters as papers but not the book. Its chapter 2 is True Believers (LIT-398), read in full in its 1997 reprint, which is the revised book text. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-432 | The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind | Minsky (2006), Simon & Schuster, read in the author’s 2005 draft. Emotions are Ways to Think, not a separate faculty. Each emotional state turns some mental resources on and others off, by Selectors that Critics trigger when they recognise a type of problem. The same machinery serves ordinary thinking. The book adds six levels of mental activity, from instinctive reaction to self-conscious reflection. It treats “consciousness”, “emotion” and “pain” as suitcase words for many processes, and the Self as a network of partial self-models. It is a design argued from examples. Against Damasio, it treats the body as one more resource the brain uses, not the stuff of emotion. | Active — read in full 2026-10-01 in the author’s posted draft of 2005 (NOTE-348), not in the published book; worth reading as the late, fullest statement of the Society of Mind programme. It is the one where emotion is put inside thinking: an emotional state is a selection of mental resources switched on and off, made by Selectors that Critics trigger, and so it is a Way to Think. Read it as a design proposal argued by examples, not as evidence. It reports no experiment, Minsky labels several of its central ideas his own conjectures, and it sets the body to the side of emotion, against the bodily account of Damasio (LIT-384, LIT-388) that this record holds. |
| LIT-436 | Intelligence without representation | Brooks (1991), Artificial Intelligence 47:139–159, written in 1987. Argues that AI should be built incrementally from complete autonomous “Creatures” tested in the real world, and that the system should be decomposed by activity into parallel layers, each connecting sensing to action, not by function into perception, a central reasoner and action. His robots have no central representation and no central control: each layer is a fixed network of simple finite-state machines, and a higher layer subsumes a lower one by suppressing or inhibiting its wires. Coherent behaviour emerges, “in the eye of an observer”, from competing behaviours. Hypothesis: representation is the wrong unit of abstraction for the bulk of intelligence. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-351) from the copy Brooks posts; worth reading as the decomposition side built and run: a robot whose purposive behaviour comes from parallel layers of simple finite-state machines with no central representation and no central control, which Brooks likens to Minsky’s account of human behaviour. The coherence of the whole, he says, exists “in the eye of an observer”. The evidence is three layers on one physical robot, described rather than measured. It makes no claim about minds or experience and disclaims interest in the philosophy. |
| LIT-439 | The Computational Boundary of a “Self”: Developmental Bioelectricity Drives Multicellularity and Scale-Free Cognition | Levin (2019), Frontiers in Psychology 10:2688. Proposes “Scale-Free Cognition”: an Individual or Self is the set of parts that pursue a goal together, bounded by the farthest events in space and time it can measure and try to change (its “cognitive light cone”). Selves scale up from homeostatic loops through memory and anticipation, and cells merge into larger Selves by sharing bioelectric state through gap junctions; cancer is the boundary shrinking back to one cell. Because every level that pursues its own goal is a Self, most living systems hold many nested, coexisting Selves, “not one, as implied by Integrated Information Theory”. Levin’s “Self” is a goal-pursuing collective, an agent and an individual in this record’s terms; the essay gives no account of a self as subject. A hypothesis essay: no model and no new data. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-341); worth reading as the composition-side statement that agency is nested by default: a Self is whatever set of parts pursues a goal together, so cells, organs, organisms and swarms are Selves at once, each bounded by its “cognitive light cone”. It is a hypothesis-and-theory essay with no model, no measurement procedure for the light cone and no data of its own. Its one sentence against IIT’s single-Self picture is asserted in a bracket, not argued, and its consciousness claims are confined to a closing speculation. |
| LIT-440 | Intentional Systems | Dennett (1971), Journal of Philosophy 68(4):87–106. An Intentional system is one whose behaviour can be explained and predicted by ascribing beliefs and desires and assuming rationality, which is the Intentional stance beside the design and physical stances. Being one is relative to an observer’s strategy, and the choice of stance is pragmatic. The stance is “unmetaphysical”: it sets aside composition, consciousness and moral standing. As psychology it is vacuous, because it presupposes rationality. Any theory that gives content to a part takes out a “loan of intelligence”, repayable only by analysing away the part’s reader: “there a little man is concealed”. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-350); worth reading as the first statement in print of the intentional stance and of the homunculus debt that Dennett later answers with “discharge”. Its definition makes being an Intentional system relative to an observer’s predictive strategy, and it says outright that the definition “does not say that Intentional systems really have beliefs and desires” (p. 91). True Believers (LIT-398) later withdraws exactly that relativity. Its lasting tool for this record is the “loan of intelligence” (p. 96): any theory that gives a part content owes an account of that part’s reader, and “wherever a theory relies on a formulation bearing the logical marks of Intentionality, there a little man is concealed”. The paper does not treat a group as an Intentional system. |
| LIT-444 | Examining the Society of Mind | Singh (2003), Computing and Informatics 22(6):521–543. A sympathetic exposition of Minsky’s Society of Mind by his student. It traces the theory’s history: Minsky and Papert’s 1970s copy-demo robot, the procedure-bearing frames of 1974, the abandoned 1976 book drafts, and the 1977 and 1980 papers. It catalogues the mechanisms and how agents communicate without shared symbols. It finds resemblances in Bayes nets, case-based reasoning, blackboards, Cyc, Soar and multiagent systems, none of which it calls a Society of Mind. Its verdict is that the theory has never been implemented. | Active — read in full 2026-10-01 (NOTE-339); worth reading as the shortest reliable map of The Society of Mind (LIT-429), written by the student who worked with Minsky on its sequel. It gives the theory’s history from the 1970s memos, a catalogue of its mechanisms (agents and agencies, K-lines, nemes and nomes, frames and transframes, difference-engines, censors, A- and B-brains, ways agents communicate and grow), and a survey of later AI it resembles. It is an exposition, not a test: it reports no implementation and quotes the theory more than it argues for it. Its history leans on unpublished 1976 drafts that only the author saw. |
| LIT-449 v2 | What we talk to when we talk to language models | Chalmers (2026), Inquiry, DOI 10.1080/0020174X.2026.2727582; circulated earlier as PhilArchive preprint CHAWWT-8. Unread. By its abstract it asks who or what our interlocutor is when we talk to an LLM: how to characterise it in terms of mental states; what kind of system it is in the philosophy of computation (“a model, an instance, a thread, or a persona?”); what personal identity comes to for such interlocutors; and what follows for AI welfare and moral status. | Unavailable — seeded 2026-10-02 from Crossref, OpenAlex (which carries the abstract of the published version) and the author’s papers page, not read: tandfonline.com, philpapers.org and philarchive.org returned 403 to every article and PDF URL, the Internet Archive was offline, and no other repository copy was found. No NOTE is filed. |
| LIT-450 | Self models | Metzinger (2007, rev. 2013), Scholarpedia 2(10):4174. There is no substantial self, only a phenomenal self-model (PSM): the conscious part of an organism’s self-model, an instrument of global control. A phenomenal self arises “if and only if a system operates under a transparent PSM”, one it cannot introspectively recognise as a model; a first-person perspective is a transparent model of the intentionality relation (PMIR). Self-models can be unconscious and artificial, as in Bongard, Zykov and Lipson’s limping starfish robot; embodiment comes in three orders, the third conscious. Full-body illusions are offered as the experimental handle. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-372); worth reading as Metzinger’s own short, open statement of the self-model theory of subjectivity (SMT) behind Being No One (LIT-467): there is no self, only a phenomenal self-model, and a system experiences itself as a self when that model is transparent, that is, when it cannot introspectively recognise it as a model. It is an encyclopedia article, not an argument: the central claim is stated as a definition with a prediction attached, its empirical examples are cited, and the online text is a revision later than the 2007 acceptance, with editing slips. |
| LIT-453 | Philosophical conceptions of the self: implications for cognitive science | Gallagher (2000), Trends in Cognitive Sciences 4(1):14–21. Divides philosophical accounts of the self into the “minimal self”, accessible to present self-consciousness without temporal extension, and the “narrative self”, extended in time through memory and story. The minimal self splits into a sense of ownership and a sense of agency, which come apart in involuntary movement and, after Frith, in schizophrenic thought insertion when a forward comparator fails. Neonatal imitation suggests an embodied minimal self; Strawson’s and Tani’s are momentary. Against Dennett’s narrative centre, the self is “the sum total of its narratives”. Read in the author’s preprint. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-377), in the author’s preprint, not the typeset article; worth reading as the paper that set the minimal self against the narrative self for cognitive science, and for the split of the minimal self into a sense of ownership and a sense of agency, which it ties to Frith’s comparator model of schizophrenic thought insertion. It is a short review: the empirical support is cited, not shown, and its own proposal, the self as “the sum total of its narratives”, is offered in two paragraphs. |
| LIT-456 | Reply to Professor Stich | Dennett (1980), Philosophical Books 21(2):73–76, replying to Stich’s critical notice of Brainstorms, “Headaches” (pp. 65–73). Accepts Stich’s summary. On rationality: the norm is grounded only minimally in evolution, and full rationality is an idealisation, so personhood rests on a concept we “only imperfectly achieve”. On pain: there are no pains in a mature psychology’s ontology, yet people feel pain; between biting the bullet, reform and common sense (pain is like holes, voices and haircuts), the choice is “a matter of policy”. Philosophy supplies the medicine for the puzzles, science the rest. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-371); worth reading as Dennett’s shortest statement of two positions he kept: the intentional stance grounds belief in an idealisation of rationality, so persons are believers by a standard “we already know we only imperfectly achieve”; and pain is not a good theoretical entity, yet people feel pain, a choice among biting the bullet, reform and common sense that is “in some measure a matter of policy”. It is also the text behind LIT-393’s account of the homunculus essay, which it confirms: Stich’s quotations stand as LIT-393 gives them, and Dennett’s acceptance of Stich’s summary is a blanket one. |
| LIT-460 v2 | Role play with large language models | Shanahan, McDonell & Reynolds (2023), Nature 623:493–498. A dialogue agent is an LLM role-playing the character its prompt describes, or more exactly a simulator keeping a superposition of simulacra consistent with the conversation. Only simulacra can appear to have beliefs, goals or a self; the simulator has none, “not even simulated versions”, and “it is role play all the way down”. When an agent says it wants to survive there is “no-one at home”. Each role-played character would carry its own theory of selfhood, which the conversation narrows; what an agent would try to preserve (hardware, process, instance) is left open. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-370), in the Nature text with the arXiv v1 preprint compared; worth reading here as the source of the simulator/simulacra account that every LLM-selfhood paper in this record answers. On it nothing is a self: the simulator has no beliefs, goals or agency “of its own, not even simulated versions”, and a simulacrum only role-plays a character that has them (“no-one at home”). Its one section on selfhood asks which self a role-played character would try to preserve, not what the system is, and leaves identity over time for a dialogue agent “far from clear”. The denial of a self is asserted from the framing, not argued against a rival. |
| LIT-465 | Simulacra as Conscious Exotica | Shanahan (2024), Inquiry 69(6):2982–3010, from arXiv:2402.12422. After Wittgenstein, consciousness words mean only what is public, so the question for an exotic entity is whether we could “engineer an encounter” with it in a shared world and what a society-wide conversation would then say. Disembodied chat agents are not even candidates; virtually embodied LLM agents could be. Tool use and memory make belief talk increasingly literal, but a chat agent has no “self worth preserving”, and a role player has no “person behind the mask”: its identity is a shifting distribution of roles. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-382) in the arXiv v2 preprint (July 2024), not the Inquiry version of record, which returned 403; worth reading as the Wittgensteinian alternative to the evidential debate about AI consciousness. It replaces “is it conscious?” with “could we engineer an encounter with it, and how would our language adapt?”, and so counts disembodied chat agents as not even candidates. On the self it is brief and pointed: a chat agent has “nothing that would qualify as a self worth preserving”, lacking body, personal history and autobiographical memory, and a role-playing agent has no “person behind the mask”; its identity, “insofar as that notion even made sense”, is the shifting distribution of roles. It argues by method and scenario, not evidence, and says so. |
| LIT-471 v2 | Shared Cooperative Activity | Bratman (1992), DOI-10.2307/2185537, The Philosophical Review 101(2): 327–341. Bratman analyses activities such as singing a duet or painting a house together. A shared cooperative activity is marked by mutual responsiveness, commitment to the joint activity, and commitment to mutual support, and it rests on a shared intention built from each participant’s intention that “we J”, with meshing subplans. The account is reductive: it uses only the intentions of individuals and their interrelations. Unread: filed from metadata and from Bratman’s later précis. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s metadata; no lawful full text was reachable (JSTOR and PDC are paywalled, the CUP reprint is paywalled, and the one course copy found returned 401 Unauthorized), so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. It is the paper that set out Bratman’s reductive account of acting together; its developed form is Shared Agency (LIT-488), whose author’s précis the record has read. |
| LIT-476 v2 | We-Intentions | Tuomela & Miller (1988), DOI-10.1007/BF00353512, Philosophical Studies 53(3): 367–389. The paper introduces the we-intention: roughly, a group member’s intention to do her part of a joint action, together with beliefs that the conditions for the joint action obtain and that this is mutually believed. The concept is applied to simple social practical reasoning and offered as basic to social theory. Unread: filed from metadata, with the content as search summaries report it. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s metadata and reference list; no lawful full text was reachable (Springer is paywalled, the University of Helsinki portal holds only the citation, and the 2020 De Gruyter reprint is closed), so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. It is the founding paper of Tuomela’s we-intention account, the main analysis Searle’s 1990 paper (LIT-490) is reported to argue against. |
| LIT-477 v3 | Walking Together: A Paradigmatic Social Phenomenon | Gilbert (1990), DOI-10.1111/j.1475-4975.1990.tb00202.x, Midwest Studies in Philosophy 15: 1–14. Gilbert takes going for a walk together as the model case of acting together and of a social group. Two analyses built from shared personal goals are rejected, because they cannot explain the walkers’ obligations and rights to appropriate behaviour. Her alternative is that the walkers must constitute the “plural subject” of a goal. Unread: filed from metadata and the abstract as search indexes give it. | Unfetched — filed 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s metadata; no lawful full text was reachable (Wiley and PDC are paywalled, the author’s SSRN posting and a public PDF at humanitiesmontana.org both sit behind bot challenges that returned 403, and the Wayback Machine copy of that PDF could not be fetched through this session’s proxy), so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. It is the short canonical statement of Gilbert’s plural-subject account, and the record’s only reading of Gilbert is second-hand, through Tomasello’s commentaries (NOTE-185). Free copy: ssrn.com/abstract=1071242 (Gilbert’s SSRN posting). |
| LIT-478 v2 | The Ant Trap: Rebuilding the Foundations of the Social Sciences | Epstein (2015), DOI-10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199381104.001.0001. Social science works with an “anthropocentric” picture on which the social world is built out of people, as an ant colony is built out of ants. Part One separates the facts that ground a social fact from the facts that anchor the frame principle saying how such facts are grounded, and argues ontological individualism false. Part Two argues that even facts about groups, including group action and intention, are grounded in more than the members. Unread: filed from the introduction, the author’s précis and the publisher’s description. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s description and the author’s own posted introduction and table of contents, not read: the book is not lawfully readable in full online (Oxford Academic is paywalled; the author posts only the introduction). The introduction and the author’s open-access précis were read. Its framework, grounding versus anchoring, is stated in the record from the précis and from the author’s SEP entry (LIT-487, read). Part Two argues that facts about groups, including their actions and intentions, are grounded in more than their members, which bears directly on THEORY-043. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-482 | Social ontology: Some basic principles | Searle (2006), DOI-10.1177/1463499606061731. Institutional reality is built from three primitives: collective intentionality, the assignment of function, and constitutive rules of the form “X counts as Y in C”. The Y status is held only by collective acceptance, and it carries deontic powers, which are desire-independent reasons for action. Institutional facts need language because they exist only as represented. Two revisions of the 1995 book: status indicators (after De Soto), and “free-standing Y terms” (after Barry Smith), such as corporations and money without currency. In those cases there is no X, and “We accept (S has power (S does A))”, a formula from later in the book, is ranked as the more general form. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-388), in its parallel English printing in Papers: Revista de Sociologia 80 (2006), pp. 51–71, not in the Anthropological Theory typesetting the DOI names; worth reading as Searle’s own short restatement of The Construction of Social Reality (LIT-485), and as the place where he concedes that “X counts as Y in C” is not the general form. Status functions imposed by collective acceptance carry deontic powers, and deontic powers are desire-independent reasons for action. Read it for the structure, not for an argument about collective intentionality: that is taken as a primitive and referred to his 1990 paper (LIT-490), not defended here. |
| LIT-483 v3 | Groups as Agents | Tollefsen (2015), Polity. Per its publisher, a survey of whether groups can literally intend, whether there is a collective mind, and whether groups should be held morally responsible, arguing “the unorthodox view that certain groups should, indeed, be treated as agents and deserve to be held morally accountable”. Chapters on group belief, intention, agency, cognition, interpreting groups and the moral responsibility of groups. Unread: filed from the description and contents only. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s description and table of contents; no lawful full text was reachable (the book is in print with Polity, licensed as an e-book, and no author-posted draft was found), so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. It is a short introduction to group belief, intention, agency, cognition and responsibility that, per its publisher, argues “certain groups should, indeed, be treated as agents and deserve to be held morally accountable”; which groups, and on what view of agency, is not recorded here. |
| LIT-487 | Social Ontology | Epstein (2018; rev. 2024), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/social-ontology/. A survey that splits social ontology into two inquiries: what determines (grounds) a social fact, and what constructs or “anchors” the category it falls under, likened to semantics and metasemantics. §3 surveys determination bases (psychologism, atomism, bodies and practices, physicalism, holism, flat ontologies) and reports that ontological individualism is widely assumed and recently contested. §4 surveys anchoring theories (agreement, Lewis’s convention, Hart and Searle’s collective acceptance, patterns, practices, language). §5 covers groups, group minds and agency, institutions, race and gender, artifacts, money, law and language. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-393); worth reading as a survey: the best single map of social ontology in the record, organised around its author’s distinction between what grounds a social fact (§3) and what anchors, or sets up, the category it falls under (§4). It is also the record’s readable source for what The Ant Trap’s grounding–anchoring framework is (LIT-478 is not lawfully readable). Read it as a survey written by a partisan: Epstein’s own positions organise the entry, and the critics of anchoring are named but given a sentence each. |
| LIT-488 v2 | Shared Agency: A Planning Theory of Acting Together | Bratman (2014), DOI-10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199897933.001.0001. The planning structures that organise an individual’s agency over time are also at the core of small-scale shared agency. A shared intention is constructed from each participant’s intention that “we J”, by way of each other’s intentions and meshing subplans, with persistence interdependence and common knowledge. These conditions are offered as sufficient, not necessary. No group subject and no new primitive is needed: the account is reductive “in spirit”, against Gilbert and Searle. Unread: filed from the chapter list and the author’s précis. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s metadata, the chapter list and the author’s open-access précis; no lawful full text of the book was reachable (Oxford Academic is paywalled, and Bratman has not posted the book or draft chapters), so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. It is the developed statement of the reductive, planning-theory account of shared agency, and the précis, read in full, says plainly where it parts from Gilbert and Searle. |
| LIT-490 v2 | Collective Intentions and Actions | Searle (1990), DOI-10.7551/mitpress/3839.003.0021, in Cohen, Morgan & Pollack (eds.), Intentions in Communication (MIT Press), pp. 401–416; reprinted in Consciousness and Language (2002). The paper in which Searle introduces collective intentionality, intentions of the form “we intend”, as a phenomenon of individual minds that is not a sum of individual “I intend” states plus mutual belief. Unread: filed from metadata, and from how Searle’s own later paper uses it. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s metadata; no lawful full text was reachable (the MIT Press chapter is paywalled and returned 403, the CUP reprint is paywalled, the Internet Archive copy of the volume is lending-only, and no author or course copy was found), so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. It is the paper that put “collective intentionality” into analytic philosophy and the source Searle’s later social ontology (LIT-482) sends readers to. |
| LIT-492 v2 | On Social Facts | Gilbert (1989), Routledge (reissued by Princeton University Press, 1992; DOI-10.1515/9780691214627). The book asks whether social groups are real over and above individuals’ thoughts. It analyses everyday concepts of social action, social groups, collective belief and social convention, in dialogue with Weber, Simmel, Durkheim and David Lewis, and proposes that core social phenomena are “plural subject” phenomena. Unread: filed from the publishers’ descriptions and the chapter list. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-02 from the publishers’ records and the chapter list; no lawful full text was reachable (the Princeton reissue is sold as an e-book on De Gruyter, and the Internet Archive’s copy of the Routledge edition is lending-only), so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. It is Gilbert’s book-length treatment of plural subjects, collective belief and social convention; “Walking Together” (LIT-477) is the short version. |
| LIT-526 | Life as we know it | Friston (2013), J. R. Soc. Interface 10(86):20130475. Any ergodic random dynamical system whose states split into internal, sensory, active and external sets with a Markov blanket has internal and active states whose flow can be written as a gradient descent on a variational free energy of the blanket and internal states (Lemma 2.1, Eqs. 2.5–2.8). They therefore “appear” to do Bayesian inference about external states and to bound their own entropy. A simulated “primordial soup” of 128 coupled Lorenz subsystems forms a blanket-enclosed cluster whose internal states predict external motion (5 of 82 above a time-reversed null) and which disperses when blanket or internal states are lesioned. The paper says a candle flame cannot have a Markov blanket, and concedes that the universe holds countless blankets, conjecturing that minimum-entropy blankets mark life. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-421), from the published text (the author’s posted PDF of the journal version and the PMC full text). Worth reading as the founding statement of the Markov-blanket formulation of the free energy principle applied to life, and as the one text in the record that names a candle flame and says it is not lifelike. Read it as a redescription, not a derivation: its “heuristic proof” shows that the flow of an ergodic system with a Markov blanket can be written as a gradient flow on a variational free energy, by choosing the variational density to equal the posterior. The free energy is variational, not thermodynamic; no heat or entropy production is computed. The simulation is one run, analysed with a blanket chosen by spectral clustering. |
| LIT-529 v2 | Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter | Deacon (2011), W. W. Norton. An account of how life, mind and purpose (“ententional” phenomena) emerged from physics, built on constraint and absence rather than on added stuff. Its contents run from absence, homunculi and teleonomy through emergence and constraint to a hierarchy of dynamics (homeodynamics, morphodynamics, teleodynamics), a minimal self-producing system (autogenesis), and then work, information, significance, evolution, self, sentience and consciousness. Unread: registered from the publisher’s description and the contents; the text was not reached. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s description and a library contents note, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. The Internet Archive scan of the Norton printing is lending-only, and no author-posted draft was found. The companion chapter the record already cites, Deacon & Cashman (2013), “Teleology versus mechanism in biology: beyond self-organization”, is identified below but was not reachable either and is not filed. |
| LIT-536 v4 | Biological Autonomy: A Philosophical and Theoretical Enquiry | Moreno & Mossio (2015), Springer, History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences 12. The book argues that biology should revolve around autonomy, not only natural selection: organisms are organized systems that self-produce and self-maintain as integrated wholes, set their own goals and norms, and promote the conditions of their existence through interaction with their environment. Chapters treat constraints and organisational closure, emergence and inter-level causation, teleology and function, agency, evolution, organisms and levels of autonomy, and cognition. Only the Introduction is read (NOTE-1437): there the authors make closure of constraints the core of biological organisation, say it differs fundamentally from the self-organisation of dissipative structures, and announce that it grounds teleology, normativity and function; the chapters that argue this are unread. | Unfetched — registered 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s description and the chapter list. The book is not open access at Springer. Its only free copy, the authors’ HAL deposit (hal-01151449, hal.science/hal-01151449/document, CC BY-NC 4.0, deposited 13 May 2015), is not the whole book, as this note earlier said: it holds the front matter (Hooker’s Foreword and the contents), the Introduction (pp. xix–xxxiv), the references and the index, and no chapter. The Introduction was read in full on 2026-10-30 (NOTE-1437, Skimmed, because only the Introduction was read). For chapters 1–8 no fuller lawful copy was found: on 2026-10-30 OpenAlex listed the HAL deposit as the book’s only open copy, and the publisher’s chapters are paywalled. HAL also served its anti-bot page to a direct fetch on 2026-10-02 and again on 2026-10-30; the deposit was read from a copy retrieved earlier the same day. It stays Unfetched for the chapters. |
| LIT-540 | Impulsive action: emotional impulses and their control | Frijda, Ridderinkhof & Rietveld (2014), Frontiers in Psychology 5:518. Impulsive action is non-deliberate but purposive. Automatic appraisal of an event’s pertinence to the agent’s concerns elicits a state of action readiness, a motive to establish, modify or end a relation to the object, with “control precedence” (urgency, persistence, attentional capture). Modes of action readiness are what distinguish one emotion from another. Events usually draw several appraisals and so several states of readiness, and their interaction regulates action: much emotion regulation is itself emotional, not reason overriding passion. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-433); filed in place of Frijda’s The Emotions (LIT-546), which could not be read, as the shortest lawfully readable statement of his action-readiness theory in his own words. Appraisal of an event’s pertinence to one’s concerns elicits a state of action readiness, a motive to change one’s relation to the object, which has “control precedence”. Modes of action readiness correspond to emotions (hostility to anger, avoidance to fear). Much emotion regulation is itself one state of action readiness checking another, so “there is no clear distinction between processes of emotion and processes of emotion regulation”. It is a theoretical paper with no data, written for impulsive action, so it states the theory’s core and not its full range. |
| LIT-545 v3 | Self-Efficacy: Toward a Unifying Theory of Behavioral Change | Bandura (1977), Psychological Review 84(2):191–215. The founding paper of self-efficacy theory: psychological treatments, whatever their form, are proposed to work by changing a person’s expectation that they can perform the needed behaviour. Unread: registered from bibliographic metadata, with no lawful abstract reachable. | Unfetched — registered 2026-10-03 from Crossref and PubMed, not read. The article is closed access at APA. Unpaywall and OpenAlex call it “green” open access, but their one location is a DOAJ record of an unrelated 2020 Jurnal Psikologi article on thalassemia screening that carries Bandura’s DOI by mistake. The copy Stanford hosted with Bandura’s papers (web.stanford.edu/dept/psychology/bandura/pajares/Bandura1977PR.pdf) now returns 403 Forbidden. Its archived snapshots are on the Wayback Machine, which this environment’s egress policy blocks, and the University of Kentucky mirror of the same collection now redirects away. A PDF of the published article is posted by the Sustainable Sanitation Alliance’s library (susana.org), a third party, so it was not read (only its first page was opened, to identify what it was). A human reader with APA access, or one who can open the archived Stanford copy, could promote this. |
| LIT-557 v2 | A meta-analytic review of experiments examining the effects of extrinsic rewards on intrinsic motivation | Deci, Koestner & Ryan (1999), Psychological Bulletin 125(6):627–668. A hierarchical meta-analysis of 128 experiments (101 with free-choice, 84 with self-report measures) on interesting tasks. Tangible rewards undermined free-choice intrinsic motivation (d = −0.34) and self-reported interest (−0.07); expected rewards did, by every task-related contingency; unexpected and task-noncontingent rewards did not; positive feedback enhanced both measures, but not children’s free choice. Read as strong support for cognitive evaluation theory and against Eisenberger and Cameron’s behavioural account. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-438), from an OCR of the scanned published article the authors post on selfdeterminationtheory.org; worth reading as the largest meta-analysis of the reward-undermining effect and the evidential base SDT cites for it. Across 128 experiments on interesting tasks, expected tangible rewards undermined free-choice intrinsic motivation (d = −0.36), engagement-, completion- and performance-contingent rewards all did (−0.40, −0.36, −0.28), unexpected and task-noncontingent rewards did not, and positive feedback enhanced it (0.33), though not for children’s free choice. It reanalyses Cameron and Pierce (LIT-556) study by study. Its categories are CET’s, and the rival authors reply, by the abstract of Cameron, Banko and Pierce (LIT-562, unread), that the negative effects are circumscribed, not pervasive. |
| LIT-558 | The “What” and “Why” of Goal Pursuits: Human Needs and the Self-Determination of Behavior | Deci & Ryan (2000), Psychological Inquiry 11(4):227–268, target article. SDT’s case for innate psychological needs, for competence, relatedness and autonomy, defined as nutriments for growth, integrity and well-being and identified functionally, against Hull’s drives and Murray’s acquired needs. The “why” of a goal (autonomous or controlled regulation) and its “what” (intrinsic or extrinsic aspiration) each predict well-being, because each affects need satisfaction. Thwarted needs yield substitutes, controlled styles and rigid patterns. SDT grounds autonomy in the organism’s tendency to self-organize, argued to be an evolved advantage. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-439), from the authors’ own deposit of the published target article on selfdeterminationtheory.org; worth reading as the full statement of what SDT means by a “need” and why it posits three. Needs are “innate psychological nutriments that are essential for ongoing psychological growth, integrity, and well-being” (p. 228), identified by what follows when they are satisfied or thwarted, not by how strongly people want them. Goals differ in their “why” (autonomous or controlled regulation) and their “what” (intrinsic or extrinsic content), and both matter because of need satisfaction. Thwarting produces need substitutes, controlled regulatory styles and rigid behaviour patterns. It is a target article: the commentaries and the authors’ reply in the same issue were not read. |
| LIT-559 | Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being | Ryan & Deci (2000), American Psychologist 55(1):68–78. Self-determination theory in eleven pages. Three innate psychological needs, for competence, autonomy and relatedness, must be satisfied for growth, integration and well-being; their thwarting is “a principal source of human distress” (p. 74). Motivation differs in kind, not only amount: extrinsic motivation runs from external through introjected and identified to integrated regulation, and becomes more autonomous as a regulation is internalized and integrated with the self. Autonomy is volition, not independence. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-442), from the authors’ own deposit of the published article on selfdeterminationtheory.org; worth reading as the shortest statement of self-determination theory by its authors, and the one most cited. It gives the three basic psychological needs (competence, autonomy, relatedness), the continuum of regulation from amotivation through external, introjected, identified and integrated regulation to intrinsic motivation, and the claim that autonomy is volition, “not … being independent, detached, or selfish” (p. 74). It is a review: every empirical claim is cited to other papers, nothing is tested here, and it states the reward-undermining result as settled by Deci, Koestner & Ryan (LIT-557), which Cameron, Banko & Pierce dispute (LIT-562, unread; by its abstract). |
| LIT-560 | Self-Regulation and the Problem of Human Autonomy: Does Psychology Need Choice, Self-Determination, and Will? | Ryan & Deci (2006), Journal of Personality 74(6):1557–1586. SDT’s defence of autonomy as a psychological construct. Philosophers (phenomenologists from Pfänder and Ricoeur; hierarchical accounts from Frankfurt and Dworkin) agree that autonomy is self-endorsement, not independence. On that definition, the critiques fail: behaviourists and Bandura define autonomy as independence from the environment; reductive neuroscience mistakes levels of explanation; nonconscious priming shows autonomy can be compromised, not that it is illusory; too many options is not self-determination; and autonomy matters across cultures. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-441), from the authors’ own deposit of the published article on selfdeterminationtheory.org; worth reading as the place where SDT states its concept of autonomy against both philosophy and psychology. Autonomy is “regulation by the self”, its opposite “heteronomy”, regulation “without self-endorsement” (abstract). It is “a matter of degree” (p. 1562), compatible with dependence and with having one option, and lies “not in being independent causes but in exercising their capacity to reflectively endorse or reject prompted actions” (p. 1573). It answers Skinner, Bandura, Pinker, Bargh, Wegner, Schwartz and Iyengar. Its engagement with Frankfurt is thin: two citations of the 1971 paper inside one paragraph on hierarchical accounts, with the analytic detail taken from Dworkin. |
| LIT-561 | Basic psychological need theory: Advancements, critical themes, and future directions | Vansteenkiste, Ryan & Soenens (2020), Motivation and Emotion 44(1):1–31. Two decades of basic psychological need theory. A basic need must be psychological, essential, inherent, distinct and universal, and its effects pervasive, content-specific, directional and explanatory. Need frustration is not merely low satisfaction: it predicts ill-being, compensatory behaviour and need substitutes, and may be transdiagnostic. Novelty, morality and beneficence are reviewed as candidate fourth needs; none is yet admitted. Universality holds for the effects of need satisfaction, not for how needs are supported. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-440), from the publisher’s typeset PDF that the authors post on selfdeterminationtheory.org; worth reading as the current statement of basic psychological need theory and of what would make something a basic need. It gives nine criteria (psychological, essential, inherent, distinct, universal; pervasive, content-specific, directional, explanatory), treats need frustration as distinct from low satisfaction and as a candidate transdiagnostic process in psychopathology, and restates universality as “universality without uniformity”: the effects of need satisfaction are claimed invariant, the ways needs are supported are not. It is an editorial introduction to two special issues, by SDT’s authors, and reviews selectively. |
| LIT-564 | The Sources of Normativity | Korsgaard (1992), Tanner Lectures at Clare Hall, Cambridge. The “normative question” asks what justifies morality’s claims on us. Voluntarism, realism and reflective endorsement each fail alone. The answer is autonomy: because human consciousness is reflective, we need reasons, and so need a “conception of your practical identity” that makes us “a law to yourself”. Obligation is “the reflective rejection of a threat to your identity”. Valuing any identity commits us to valuing our humanity, and reasons are public, so others can obligate us. “Autonomy is the source of obligation.” | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-465), as the read substitute for the book The Sources of Normativity (1996, LIT-599), which is its “longer version” with commentaries and a reply. Worth reading as Korsgaard’s own first statement of practical identity and of the claim that “autonomy is the source of obligation”. The reflective structure of human consciousness means we must act for reasons and so must have “a conception of your practical identity”, “a description under which you value yourself”; reasons express that identity and obligations “spring from what that identity forbids”. Valuing any practical identity commits one to valuing one’s humanity, and the publicity of reasons commits one to others. The lectures concede that the argument is “sketchy, and sketchily argued”. |
| LIT-566 | Defining Agency: Individuality, Normativity, Asymmetry, and Spatio-temporality in Action | Barandiaran, Di Paolo & Rohde (2009), Adaptive Behavior 17(5):367–386. Three conditions are jointly necessary and sufficient for minimal agency: the system defines its own individuality, it is the active source of modulations of its coupling with the environment (interactional asymmetry), and it regulates that coupling by norms it generates (normativity). Generatively, an agent is an open autonomous system (a precarious network of mutually enabling processes) that adaptively modulates its coupling so as to maintain some of its constituent processes. Minimal life satisfies this; life is sufficient for agency but not necessary. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-458), from the authors’ own deposit of the accepted text. Worth reading as the standard organizational definition of minimal agency, and as the clearest statement that an agent is not the same thing as an individual. Individuality is one of three conditions, with interactional asymmetry and normativity; it is a precondition for the other two and is not sufficient for agency. The generative definition: an agent is an autonomous organization that adaptively regulates its coupling with its environment and contributes to sustaining itself as a consequence. The paper rejects statistical and energetic measures of asymmetry as sufficient, and says systems optimising an externally fixed function should not be treated as models of agency. |
| LIT-567 | A Planning Agent’s Self-Governance over Time | Bratman (2018), essay 11 of Planning, Time, and Self-Governance (OUP). A planning agent’s self-governance over time is self-governance at each time along a planned activity, plus cross-temporal links of intention that parallel the interlocking intentions of shared agency: in diachronic self-governance one acts “together” with oneself. Standpoints are “diachronicalized” by a conditional, reflexive end of one’s own diachronic self-governance. That end can make willpower and resistance to “shuffling” self-governed, while anticipated regret at “plan’s end” excludes drinking Kavka’s toxin. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-464), in the author’s pre-publication draft of 10 July 2017, not the typeset chapter. Worth reading as the read substitute for Planning, Time, and Self-Governance (2018) and, through its summary of the planning theory, for Intention, Plans, and Practical Reason (1987, LIT-593). A planning agent governs herself over time when she is self-governing at each time along a planned activity and her intentions at those times interlock like the intentions of people acting together, so that she acts “together” with herself. Her standpoints are “diachronicalized”: they include a conditional, reflexive end of her own diachronic self-governance. That end explains how willpower and resisting “shuffling” between incomparable options can be self-governed, and anticipated regret at plan’s end rules out drinking Kavka’s toxin. A philosophical model argued by cases; nothing in it is tested. |
| LIT-568 | Précis: Being No One | Metzinger (2005), PSYCHE 11(5), the author’s précis of Being No One. Minimal consciousness is a global world-model in a window of presence that cannot be recognised as a model (globality, presentationality, transparency). A phenomenal self is a transparent self-model: “no such things as selves exist in the world”. Transparency comes in degrees, and the self-model’s opaque partition is what lets humans doubt their own self-representation. The unity of consciousness is a single global functional cluster. A first-person perspective is a phenomenal model of the intentionality relation, and iterating it yields introspective and social intelligence. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-460), as the read substitute for Being No One (LIT-467), which it summarises in Metzinger’s own words. Worth reading as the most complete short statement of the self-model theory of subjectivity (SMT): more of the machinery than “Self models” (LIT-450), in particular the six constraints, the degrees of transparency, and the phenomenal model of the intentionality relation (PMIR). Phenomenal selfhood is a transparent self-model, “a function realized by a lack of information”; “no such things as selves exist in the world”. The unity of a conscious world is a global functional cluster bound by “highest-order binding”. It states the theory and its predictions; the evidence is cited, not shown, and the neural sections say how little is known. |
| LIT-571 | Participatory sense-making: An enactive approach to social cognition | De Jaegher & Di Paolo (2007), Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 6(4):485–507. Coordination between coupled systems is cheap and common. When patterns of coordination and the course of an encounter shape each other, the interaction acquires its own operationally closed, precarious organization. Social interaction is then regulated coupling between autonomous agents that constitutes an autonomous relational organization without destroying the agents’ autonomy. Because sense-making is embodied in movement, interactors can coordinate their sense-making, along a spectrum from modulated individual sense-making to jointly created meaning. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-456), from the published version posted on De Jaegher’s own site. Worth reading as the founding statement of participatory sense-making. A social interaction is defined as regulated coupling between autonomous agents that itself becomes an autonomous organization in the relational domain, without destroying the agents’ autonomy; coordinating sense-making in interaction can generate meanings neither individual had. The argument is conceptual, illustrated by everyday cases and by the perceptual-crossing experiments; nothing is measured in the paper. |
| LIT-573 v2 | Self-Command in Practice, in Policy, and in a Theory of Rational Choice | Schelling (1984), American Economic Review 74(2):1-11, the Richard T. Ely Lecture, on self-command and what it means for the theory of rational choice. Unread: no lawful free copy. Schelling’s 1980 essay “The Intimate Contest for Self-Command”, LIT-602, is read in its place. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-03 from bibliographic records, not read. No lawful free copy was found. The article is on JSTOR (AER 74(2), the May 1984 Papers and Proceedings issue), which returned a bot challenge and was not pursued. RePEc lists no downloadable version. It is reprinted in Schelling’s Strategies of Commitment and Other Essays (Harvard University Press, 2006, pp. 63-81), which is not open access. The only copies found online were on a personal website that is not the author’s and on course pages, which this record does not use. Schelling’s earlier, freely published essay on the same subject was read instead and filed as LIT-602 (NOTE-452). A human with JSTOR access could read this lecture and move it to Active. |
| LIT-575 v2 | Identification and Wholeheartedness | Frankfurt (1987/88), in Schoeman (ed.), Responsibility, Character, and the Emotions (CUP), pp. 27–45; reprinted in The Importance of What We Care About (CUP 1988), pp. 159–176. Unread. By the record’s second-hand reports it is Frankfurt’s answer to the regress in the hierarchical account: identification ends in a “decisive commitment” made “without reservation”, which is not arbitrary, and wholeheartedness is the integration that such a decision aims at, extruding the rival desire “as an outlaw”. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-03 from Cambridge’s chapter records and the record’s own second-hand readings, not read. No lawful full text was found: the chapter is paywalled at Cambridge Core in both the Schoeman volume and the 1988 collection, Unpaywall lists no open copy, and the copies a web search turns up are uploads to academia.edu and lecture notes about the essay, not the essay. A human reader with library access to either volume (pp. 27–45 of the first, pp. 159–176 of the second) can read it in an hour; that reading would move this to Active and is the first-hand text THEORY-029 needs for its middle case. |
| LIT-583 v2 | Breakdown of Will | Ainslie (2001), Cambridge University Press. The book-length statement of picoeconomics: hyperbolic discounting makes a person a population of bargaining interests, and will is the recursive bundling of choices into precedents. Unread: registered from the publisher’s description and the précis, LIT-586, which stands in for it. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-03 from the publisher’s description and from the outline of the book given in its précis, not read. Not open access: Unpaywall reports no open copy, and no author deposit of the book was found (the author’s site, picoeconomics.org, carries the précis and articles, not the book). The owner suggested the précis instead, and it is read and filed as LIT-586 (NOTE-443), which follows the book’s three sections and twelve chapters. The book is kept as the citation others reach for. A human with library access could read chapters 5-8 (the bargaining model and its evidence) against the précis. |
| LIT-586 | Précis of Breakdown of Will | Ainslie (2005), Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28(5), the précis of Breakdown of Will (2001). People and other animals discount delayed rewards hyperbolically, so preferences reverse as a smaller, sooner reward comes near, and a person becomes a population of reward-seeking “interests” that must forestall one another. Willpower is the bundling of future choices by treating the present one as a precedent: an intertemporal repeated prisoner’s dilemma, not an organ or a top-down ego. The same recursion predicts the will’s costs: legalism, circumscribed “lapse districts”, motivated blindness to lapses, and rules that favour countable goals over subtle ones. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-443), as the substitute for the 2001 book (LIT-583), which the owner suggested and which the précis follows chapter by chapter. Worth reading as the shortest complete statement of picoeconomics in Ainslie’s own words. Hyperbolic discounting makes preference reverse as a smaller, sooner reward draws near, so a person behaves like a population of “interests” that bargain across time. Will is not a faculty above them but a recursive self-prediction: treating each choice as a precedent “bundles” future rewards, an intertemporal repeated prisoner’s dilemma in which “credibility is power”. The same mechanism predicts the will’s side effects: legalism, “lapse districts”, motivated misperception and compulsive over-control. |
| LIT-587 | The Normative Constitution of Agency | Korsgaard (2014), in Rational and Social Agency: The Philosophy of Michael Bratman (OUP), pp. 190–214. Two conceptions of agency are set side by side: natural (action is movement caused by the right mental state) and normatively constituted (action is movement backed by a unified agent, whose unity is achieved by following norms). Following the categorical and hypothetical imperatives gives action “the form of self-determined efficacy”. Choosing maxims under that form constitutes one’s practical identity. Self-consciousness of one’s own attitudes sets the task of unification. Unity of agency “is an achievement, not a given”, so people can literally act together. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-455), in the author’s posted manuscript, not the typeset chapter. Worth reading as the read substitute for Self-Constitution (2009, LIT-597), which it summarises and extends, and as Korsgaard’s direct engagement with Bratman. Agency is “normatively constituted”: an action is a movement “backed by the agent as a whole”, and that unity is achieved by following the categorical and hypothetical imperatives, which give action “the form of self-determined efficacy”. The content of the maxims we choose under that form constitutes our “practical identities”. So “we make ourselves into agents”, and unity of agency, individual or collective, “is an achievement, not a given”. Argued, not proved; the account of reason as unification is said to be “lifted” from her other work. |
| LIT-590 v2 | Structures of Agency: Essays | Bratman (2007), Oxford University Press: twelve essays (1996–2006) on how planning structures human agency over time and ground self-governance. They include “Reflection, Planning, and Temporally Extended Agency” (on the Lockean role of plans), “Two Problems about Human Agency”, “Autonomy and Hierarchy”, “Three Theories of Self-Governance” and “Temptation Revisited”. Unread: registered from the contents; the theory is read in Bratman’s 2018 essay LIT-567. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-03 from the Crossref records of the book and its thirteen chapters, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. Oxford Academic is closed, and the Internet Archive scan (structuresofagen0000brat) is an access-restricted lending copy, not opened. No chapter was found as a lawful open article. Its theory of self-governance is read first-hand in Bratman’s later essay “A Planning Agent’s Self-Governance over Time” (2018, LIT-567), which builds on its essays. Filed because it is the collection in which the planning theory of self-governance and its Lockean reading appear, and other filings in this batch cite it. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-593 v2 | Intention, Plans, and Practical Reason | Bratman (1987), Harvard University Press; reissued CSLI 1999. The founding statement of the planning theory of intention. As Bratman summarises it in LIT-567, prior partial plans “settle practical issues, pose problems of means and the like, filter solutions to those problems, and guide action”, supporting cross-temporal and social organisation within our cognitive limits. Unread: registered from catalogue records; the theory is read in the 2018 essay. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-03 from library catalogue records, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. Harvard University Press (1987) and the CSLI reissue (1999) are not open, and the Internet Archive’s two scans are access-restricted lending copies, not opened. Its planning theory is read first-hand in Bratman’s own later statement, “A Planning Agent’s Self-Governance over Time” (2018, LIT-567, read in full), which extends it. Filed because it is the canonical citation for the planning theory of intention. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-596 v2 | Three Theories of Self-Governance | Bratman (2004), Philosophical Topics 32(1/2):21–46; reprinted in Structures of Agency (OUP 2007), pp. 222–253. Unread. Per the publisher’s abstract it revisits the Frankfurt–Watson exchange over the structures of free agency, treats it as a debate about self-governance, holds that agential authority comes from an attitude’s role in the “Lockean organization” of temporally extended agency rather than from tracking the good, gives that role to self-governing policies, and proposes an intention-based theory. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-03 from the Crossref and Oxford Academic records, not read. No lawful full text was found: the article is paywalled at the Philosophy Documentation Center (purchase, $20) and the reprint at Oxford Academic, Unpaywall and Semantic Scholar list no open copy, and PhilPapers and ResearchGate refused automated requests (403). A human reader with access to Philosophical Topics 32 or to Structures of Agency (pp. 222–253) can read it; that reading would move this to Active and would supply THEORY-029 with Bratman’s self-governing policies first-hand. |
| LIT-597 v2 | Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity | Korsgaard (2009), Oxford University Press, from her 2002 Locke Lectures. The argument is that we constitute ourselves as agents, and as the particular agents we are, by choosing under the constitutive principles of action, the categorical and hypothetical imperatives. On Plato’s “constitutional model”, good action is action that issues from a unified soul. The chapters run from agency and identity to “How to be a Person”. Unread: registered from the contents; the account is read in LIT-587. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-03 from the Crossref records of the book and its ten chapters, not read: no lawful copy of the book could be reached. Oxford Academic is closed and the Internet Archive scan (selfconstitution0000kors) is an access-restricted lending copy. Korsgaard’s drafts of the 2002 Locke Lectures it grew from are no longer on her Harvard site, but survive in the Internet Archive’s captures of her old FAS page (people.fas.harvard.edu/~korsgaar/Korsgaard.LL1–LL6, 2002–2005). They are author-posted and lawful, but book-length and superseded, and were not read. Its account is read first-hand in her short restatement “The Normative Constitution of Agency” (2014, LIT-587, read in full), which extends it. Filed because it is the canonical citation for self-constitution. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied or the drafts are read, not on merit. |
| LIT-599 v2 | The Sources of Normativity | Korsgaard (1996), Cambridge University Press, ed. Onora O’Neill: the expanded Tanner Lectures (1992), with commentaries by G. A. Cohen, Raymond Geuss, Thomas Nagel and Bernard Williams and Korsgaard’s reply. The four lectures follow the 1992 sequence: the normative question, reflective endorsement, the authority of reflection, and the origin of value and the scope of obligation. Unread: registered from the contents; the argument is read in the lectures, LIT-564. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-03 from the Crossref records of the book and its chapters, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. Cambridge Core is closed, the author’s Harvard deposit (DASH) answered with an AWS WAF human-verification page that was not passed, and the Internet Archive scan (sourcesofnormati0000kors) is an access-restricted lending copy. Its argument is read first-hand in the Tanner Lectures it expands (1992, LIT-564, read in full), which it extends. Filed because it is the canonical citation for practical identity, and because what it adds (the commentaries and Korsgaard’s reply) is what the lectures lack. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-600 v2 | Attention to Action: Willed and Automatic Control of Behavior | Norman & Shallice (1986), in Davidson, Schwartz & Shapiro (eds.), Consciousness and Self-Regulation vol. 4 (Plenum), pp. 1-18; first issued as CHIP Report 99 (UCSD, December 1980). Per the report’s ERIC abstract: routine action runs off by “contention scheduling” among competing schemas, and a “supervisory attentional mechanism” biases that selection for novel, ill-learned, dangerous or planned action; “will becomes the application of attentional resources to the control of action”. Unread. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-03 from bibliographic records and from the ERIC abstract of the 1980 technical report, not read. The 1986 chapter is not open access: Unpaywall reports no open copy, and SpringerLink returned a JavaScript bot challenge, which was not pursued. The 1980 version (CHIP Report 99, University of California San Diego, catalogued by ERIC as ED205562, “Technical Report No. 8006”, 43 pages) was the brief’s lead. ERIC has a catalogue record and abstract but no full text: its fulltext URL returns 404. The copies on Academia.edu sit behind a bot challenge, and those on ResearchGate and Scribd are uploads this record does not use. No DTIC copy was found. A human could ask UCSD’s library or the authors’ institutions for the CHIP report, or read the chapter through a library, and move this to Active. |
| LIT-602 | The Intimate Contest for Self-Command | Schelling (1980), The Public Interest, Summer 1980, pp. 94-118. People behave sometimes “as if they had two selves” in “continual contest for control”, and the tactics of self-management (removing the option, bright lines, monitoring, delays, raising the stakes) are the tactics of managing someone else. A single-dimension model of impatience fits poorly. Which self is authentic is left open. Failures of consumer self-management may be worth “on the order of a trillion dollars”. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-452), in place of the 1984 Ely Lecture (LIT-573), which has no lawful free copy. Worth reading as Schelling’s own first statement of “egonomics”: a person sometimes behaves “as if they had two selves” that alternate in command, and the tactics people use on themselves (mittens, alarm clocks across the room, bright lines, Christmas savings, deadlines, delays) are the tactics they use to manage another person. It refuses to say which self is authentic in general, and it gives an order-of-magnitude estimate that failures of consumer self-management cost as much as all other consumer-ignorance problems together. |
| LIT-603 v2 | The Emperor’s New Markov Blankets | Bruineberg, Dołęga, Dewhurst & Baltieri (2020 preprint; BBS 45:e183, 2022). Markov blankets entered variational inference as Pearl’s conditional-independence shields, tools on a scientist’s map. In the free-energy literature since Friston 2013 they became boundaries in the world between agent and environment: “Friston blankets”. The two are different constructs; Friston blankets need extra assumptions (a chosen internal node, sensorimotor labels, steady state, sparse coupling) that the formalism does not supply. Using them for metaphysical conclusions (“inference within a model”) requires metaphysical premises; used instrumentally (“inference with a model”) they are innocent but philosophically idle. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-447), but in its December 2020 PhilSci-Archive version; the Behavioral and Brain Sciences target article of 2021–2022 is, by the authors’ own note, “heavily rewritten” and could not be read lawfully beyond its abstract. Worth reading as the critique that names the problem: “Pearl blankets”, the conditional-independence tool of graphical models, are conflated with “Friston blankets”, a realist construct meant to be the boundary between an agent and its world. The second cannot be read off the mathematics of the first, and its use to settle questions about life and mind needs metaphysical premises of its own. It re-runs the primordial-soup simulation of LIT-526 and shows how the blanket found there depends on modelling choices. |
| LIT-605 | An Accumulator Model for Spontaneous Neural Activity Prior to Self-Initiated Movement | Schurger, Sitt & Dehaene (2012), PNAS 109(42). In Libet’s spontaneous movement task, a leaky stochastic accumulator, δx = (I − kx)Δt + cξ√Δt, with weak constant urgency I and a threshold, fitted only to waiting times, reproduces the averaged readiness potential (r² = 0.96): time-locking to threshold crossings averages up the autocorrelated noise that produced them. Fast responses to random interruptions were preceded by a slow negativity, as predicted. The “neural decision to move now” is the late threshold crossing, about 150 ms before movement, so Libet’s inference of an unconscious decision a half-second earlier is unfounded. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-462); worth reading as the model that reinterprets the readiness potential. A leaky stochastic accumulator with a weak constant input (“urgency”), fitted with three parameters to 14 participants’ waiting times in Libet’s task, reproduces the shape of the averaged readiness potential (r² = 0.96) because averaging epochs time-locked to threshold crossings recovers the noise that happened to carry the accumulator there. Its prediction, that fast responses to unpredictable clicks are preceded by a slow negativity, was confirmed (13 participants). On this account the “neural decision to move now” is the threshold crossing about 150 ms before movement, not the onset of the readiness potential, and Libet’s inference that the brain decides before awareness is “unfounded”. The authors say plainly that this shows the readiness potential could reflect spontaneous fluctuation, not that it does. |
| LIT-684 v4 | Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility | Fischer & Ravizza (1998), Cambridge University Press. Unread seed. The most influential reasons-responsiveness theory of moral responsibility. Responsibility requires guidance control, not regulative control (the control that involves alternative possibilities), and Frankfurt-type cases show the two come apart. An agent has guidance control of an action when it issues from her own, moderately reasons-responsive mechanism: regularly receptive to reasons, including moral ones, and at least weakly reactive to them. The mechanism is her own when she has taken responsibility for it, which makes responsibility historical. Guidance control so described is compatible with causal determinism, which is the position Fischer calls semicompatibilism. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-03 as a seed, from Crossref’s book and chapter records, the chapter openings Cambridge Core displays, the record’s second-hand readings, the SEP entry Moral Responsibility (LIT-691) and Fischer’s own summary in “Stories and the Meaning of Life” (LIT-689, read), not read. No lawful full text was found: the book is paywalled at Cambridge Core, and Unpaywall and OpenAlex list no open copy (oa_status closed, no repository holding). The shorter work the record’s book rule asks for is the authors’ own précis (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 61(2), September 2000, first page 441, DOI 10.2307/2653660), also closed: JSTOR answered with a bot challenge, so I stopped there. Fischer’s UC Riverside pages post no papers that could be reached, and the copies of the précis in two third-party collections of his papers (andrewmbailey.com/jmf and its wixsite continuation) are not the author’s, a publisher’s or a repository’s, so they were not opened. A web search also shows a PDF titled “Fischer Guidance control and RR” on a UNAM institute’s site, whose search snippet is the book’s series page; it is a course file with no statement of permission, so it was not opened either. A person with Cambridge Core or library access can supply the book (Cambridge UP, 1998, DOI 10.1017/CBO9780511814594); chapters 2, 3 and 8 (pp. 28–91 and 207–239) are the parts to read first, and the short précis is the quickest way to an Active reading. Update 2026-10-05: the précis is now read (LIT-728), with chapter 1 to p. 19 from the publisher’s preview. |
| LIT-685 v3 | Freedom Within Reason | Wolf (1990), Oxford University Press. Unread seed. The book-length Reason View: free will is “the freedom to be good, or the freedom to do the right thing for the right reasons” (publisher’s abstract). It sets up the dilemma of autonomy, argues that the Real Self View (Hume, Frankfurt, Watson, Taylor) and the Autonomy View both fail, states the Reason View, defends its notion of ability against determinism, and asks what the True and the Good must be for the view to hold. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-03 as a seed, from Crossref’s book and chapter records (whose abstracts are each chapter’s opening paragraph), the SEP entry the record holds and an MIT lecture handout, not read. No lawful full text was found: the book is paywalled at Oxford Academic, Unpaywall lists no open copy (oa_status closed), and no author or repository deposit turned up. A person with Oxford Academic or library access can supply it (Oxford University Press, 1990, 153 pp., DOI 10.1093/oso/9780195056167.001.0001); chapter 4, “The Reason View” (pp. 67–93), and chapter 2, “The Real Self View” (pp. 23–45), are the parts to read first. |
| LIT-686 v2 | The Importance of What We Care About | Frankfurt (1982), Synthese 53(2):257–272; reprinted as the title essay of The Importance of What We Care About (CUP 1988), pp. 80–94. Unread. By the record’s second-hand reports it is the source of two of Frankfurt’s later themes: caring as a category of the will (Buss and Westlund, SEP Personal Autonomy §2) and volitional necessity, the inability to will otherwise that Luther’s “I can do no other” illustrates (Robb, SEP PAP §3.3). Frankfurt’s own preface calls it his first “stab” at “a theory of ideals”. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-04 from Crossref, the record’s second-hand readings and Frankfurt’s own preface to the 1988 collection, not read. No lawful full text was found. The article is paywalled at Springer, whose page answered a plain request with a script challenge, so I stopped there; Unpaywall and OpenAlex list no open copy (oa_status closed), and the one repository location OpenAlex gives (a Georgetown handle, 10822/792792) does not resolve. The chapter in the 1988 collection is at Cambridge Core, which sells this collection’s chapters (as found for LIT-575), and Cambridge’s publisher preview of the collection stops in chapter 1. The copies a web search turns up are Scribd uploads and an academia.edu discussion, not the essay on a course page, an author’s page or a repository, so none was opened. A person with library access to Synthese 53(2), pp. 257–272 (DOI 10.1007/BF00484902), or to The Importance of What We Care About, pp. 80–94, can supply the 16 pages; a reading would move this to Active. |
| LIT-687 v3 | Responsiveness and Moral Responsibility | Fischer (1987/88), in Schoeman (ed.), Responsibility, Character, and the Emotions (CUP), pp. 81–106; read in its My Way reprint. Frankfurt-type cases show responsibility does not need the ability to do otherwise, so the mechanism that actually issues in action, not the agent, must be reasons-responsive, and weak responsiveness suffices. Responsibility is historical and compatible with determinism (semicompatibilism). | Active — read 2026-10-05 (NOTE-579): in full, in the reprint in Fischer’s My Way (OUP 2006), from Andrew M. Bailey’s collection of Fischer’s papers, used on the owner’s instruction. Worth reading as the first statement of mechanism-based reasons-responsiveness. Frankfurt-type cases move the requirement from the agent to the mechanism that actually issues in the action; weak responsiveness is held sufficient; the result is named semicompatibilism. Fischer concedes an insane-agent counterexample (note 11), which his later book with Ravizza (LIT-684) answers. |
| LIT-688 v3 | Asymmetrical Freedom | Wolf (1980), The Journal of Philosophy 77(3):151–166. Unread. By the SEP’s report it is the origin of the Reason View’s asymmetry: an agent who acts in accord with the True and the Good is praiseworthy even if psychologically determined so that she could not have done otherwise, but one who acts against it is blameworthy only if she could have done otherwise. Blame therefore needs regulative control and praise needs only guidance control, and Wolf answers the threat from determinism by denying that physical determination entails psychological determination. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-03 from Crossref, the record’s own second-hand readings and the SEP entry it already holds, not read. No lawful full text was found. The article is paywalled at JSTOR (stable 2025667) and the Philosophy Documentation Center, and JSTOR’s free Early Journal Content stops long before 1980. Unpaywall lists no open copy (oa_status closed). The author’s UNC faculty page posts no papers. PhilPapers (WOLAF) answered with a bot challenge, so I stopped there. The PDFs a web search turns up are a JSTOR download re-posted on an unrelated Squarespace site, a syllabus-collection upload on Weebly, and Scribd and Course Hero uploads; none is the author’s, a publisher’s or an institutional repository’s, so none was opened. A person with JSTOR or PDCnet access can supply the 16-page PDF (Journal of Philosophy 77(3), pp. 151–166, DOI 10.2307/2025667); a reading of it would move this to Active and is the text the asymmetry THEORY candidate needs. |
| LIT-689 | Stories and the Meaning of Life | Fischer (2009), Philosophic Exchange 39(1), pp. 3–15. Section I sketches his framework for moral responsibility: guidance control, not regulative control, is the freedom-relevant condition; it consists in acting from one’s own, moderately reasons-responsive mechanism; responsibility is historical and compatible with causal determinism; and the moral of Frankfurt-style cases is that it depends on how the actual sequence unfolds. The paper’s thesis is that the value of acting freely is the value of artistic self-expression: free action makes a life a story with narrative value, though the life is judged mainly by moral and prudential standards. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-547); worth reading as the only first-hand, lawful statement by Fischer that the record holds of his framework for moral responsibility: guidance control, not regulative control, is the freedom-relevant condition; guidance control is mechanism ownership plus moderate reasons-responsiveness; responsibility is historical and compatible with causal determinism; and the moral of Frankfurt-style cases is that responsibility depends on the actual sequence. Its own thesis is that the value of acting freely is the value of artistic self-expression, which gives a life narrative value. It lists the framework’s elements without arguing for them. |
| LIT-690 v3 | Sanity and the Metaphysics of Responsibility | Wolf (1987/88), in Schoeman (ed.), Responsibility, Character, and the Emotions (CUP), pp. 46–62. Unread. By second-hand reports it argues that the “deep self” views of Frankfurt, Watson and Taylor, on which an agent is responsible when her actions flow from desires and values she identifies with, are insufficient. JoJo, raised by a vicious dictator, identifies wholly with the values he inherits yet is not responsible, because his upbringing leaves him unable to see right from wrong. What must be added is sanity: the ability to know and appreciate what one is doing and that it is right or wrong. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-03 from Cambridge’s chapter record and opening extract, the record’s second-hand readings and an MIT lecture handout about the essay, not read. No lawful full text was found. The chapter is paywalled at Cambridge Core (the page shows only the opening paragraph). Unpaywall lists no open copy (oa_status closed). The author’s UNC faculty page posts no papers, and PhilPapers (WOLSAT) answered with a bot challenge, so I stopped there. The PDFs a web search turns up are an anthology reprint re-posted on an unrelated Squarespace site and Scribd and Course Hero uploads; none is the author’s, a publisher’s or an institutional repository’s, so none was opened. A person with library access to Schoeman (ed.), Responsibility, Character, and the Emotions (Cambridge UP, chapter 3, pp. 46–62, DOI 10.1017/CBO9780511625411.003), or to any reprint (it is widely anthologised, including in Watson’s Free Will), can supply the 17 pages; a reading of them would move this to Active and is the first-hand text the Reason View THEORY candidate needs. |
| LIT-691 | Moral Responsibility | Talbert (2019; revised 2024), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. A survey of moral responsibility: its relation to free will and determinism, forward-looking, Strawsonian and reasons-responsiveness accounts, the attributability/accountability distinction that grew from Wolf and Watson, the moral competence condition (Wolf’s JoJo), conversational views, standing to blame, outcomes, skepticism, moral luck, ultimate responsibility, manipulation and the epistemic condition. Its §2.3 is a page-referenced summary of Fischer and Ravizza’s guidance control. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-548); worth reading as the record’s map of moral responsibility apart from the free-will question, and as its most exact second-hand source for two accounts the record cannot read first-hand: Fischer and Ravizza’s guidance control (§2.3, with page references to the 1998 book) and Wolf’s critique of Real Self views and her moral-competence condition, including the JoJo case (§§3.1.1, 3.2). It reports Wolf’s praise/blame asymmetry only in one sentence of its preamble. |
| LIT-692 | Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person | Frankfurt (1971), The Journal of Philosophy 68(1):5–20. What is essential to a person is the structure of the will. A person’s will is the effective first-order desire, the one that moves him “all the way to action” (p. 8). A second-order volition is wanting a desire to be one’s will; persons have them, and wantons, who “do not care” about their wills, do not (pp. 10–11). Forming one is identifying with one desire and withdrawing from another (p. 13). Freedom of the will is having the will one wants, “securing the conformity of his will to his second-order volitions” (p. 15), and a decisive identification “resounds” through all higher orders (p. 16). Moral responsibility needs neither a free will nor alternatives: the willing addict acts “of his own free will” (pp. 18–20). | Active — read in full 2026-10-04 (NOTE-545); worth reading as the source of the hierarchical account of the will, which the record has so far held only second-hand: first- and second-order desires, the will as the effective desire, second-order volitions, wantons and persons, freedom of the will as having the will one wants, decisive identification that “resounds” through higher orders, and a responsibility that needs neither a free will nor alternatives. Read it knowing that it is short and programmatic, that identification is stated, not analysed, and that it already contains both the decisive commitment (p. 16) and the acceptance of an addict made by another (n. 10), which the record’s surveys date later. |
| LIT-693 v2 | The Importance of What We Care About: Philosophical Essays | Frankfurt (1988), Cambridge University Press: thirteen essays from 1969 to 1988, twelve reprinted “with minor stylistic changes” and “Rationality and the Unthinkable” new. Not read as a book. Its preface, read in the publisher’s preview, says the essays’ considerations are “primarily structural rather than historical”, that volition rather than reason is the faculty they explore, and that necessity is “in certain respects essential” to autonomy. The record cites its pagination as IWWCA. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-04 as a seed, from Crossref and from Cambridge’s publisher preview of the book (front matter, contents, sources, the three-page preface and reprint pp. 1–9 of chapter 1), not read as a book. The book is sold at Cambridge Core and Unpaywall lists no open copy. Its essays are filed one by one where they matter: chapters 1 and 2 (LIT-694, LIT-692) were read in full from their journal versions, and chapters 7 and 12 (LIT-686, LIT-575) are Deferred. The seed is kept because the record cites the book’s pagination (“IWWCA”) throughout and because its preface states Frankfurt’s method first-hand. A person with library access can supply the remaining essays; chapters 5, 8 and 12 are the ones the record’s theories lean on. |
| LIT-694 | Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility | Frankfurt (1969), The Journal of Philosophy 66(23):829–839. The principle of alternate possibilities (PAP), “a person is morally responsible for what he has done only if he could have done otherwise”, is false. Coercion excuses only when the agent acts because of it (§§II– III). Black, ready to make Jones4 act as he wants and never needing to, shows that circumstances can make an action unavoidable without playing any role in bringing it about (§IV); such a fact “does not help in any way to understand” the action and cannot excuse it (§V). PAP should be replaced by: not responsible “if he did it only because he could not have done otherwise”, which “does not appear to conflict” with compatibilism (pp. 838–839). | Active — read in full 2026-10-04 (NOTE-546); worth reading as the origin of Frankfurt-style cases and the shortest first-hand statement of the argument against the principle of alternate possibilities: a fact that makes an action unavoidable but plays no role in bringing it about cannot excuse, so PAP should give way to “a person is not morally responsible for what he has done if he did it only because he could not have done otherwise” (p. 838). Read it knowing that its case is schematic (Black, Jones4 and “a certain action”; the voting and shooting versions in the record’s surveys are later retellings), that its prior sign is in a footnote, and that it leaves “could have done otherwise” and “morally responsible” unanalysed on purpose (n. 1). |
| LIT-695 v2 | The Faintest Passion | Frankfurt (1992), Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 66(3):5–16, his Eastern Division Presidential Address; reprinted in Necessity, Volition, and Love (CUP 1999), pp. 95–107. Unread. By the record’s second-hand reports it replaces decisive commitment with “satisfaction”, an absence of “restlessness or resistance” toward one’s motives (Buss and Westlund, SEP Personal Autonomy n. 1), and holds that wholeheartedness needs the person to be “resolutely on the side of one of the forces struggling within him”, not untroubled by opposition (as Velleman quotes it, NVL 100). | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-04 from Crossref and the record’s second-hand readings, not read. No lawful full text was found. Unpaywall and OpenAlex list no open copy of the address or of its reprints (oa_status closed): it is at JSTOR (stable 3130658), the APA Centennial Series reprint of 2013 is at the Philosophy Documentation Center, and the chapter in Necessity, Volition, and Love is at Cambridge Core. I did not open those pages. The copies a web search turns up are student-notes sites and academia.edu or ResearchGate discussions, not the address on a course page, an author’s page or a repository, so none was opened. A person with access to Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 66(3), pp. 5–16 (DOI 10.2307/3130658), or to Necessity, Volition, and Love (CUP 1999), pp. 95–107, can supply the 12 pages; a reading would move this to Active and is one of the readings THEORY-029’s promote_when asks for. |
| LIT-698 v2 | Collective Guilt | Isaacs (2011), ch. 3 of Moral Responsibility in Collective Contexts (OUP), pp. 71–94. Unread. By a summary of its abstract, it takes collective guilt to be blameworthy collective moral responsibility, a feature of collective agents that does not distribute to members; separates being guilty, believing oneself guilty and feeling guilty, and personal, membership and collective guilt; and, engaging Gilbert, concludes that collectives may be guilty without having guilt feelings. The review in NDPR confirms the non-distribution claim (pp. 81–83). | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-04, not read: no lawful full text was reachable. The work the owner means is chapter 3, “Collective Guilt”, of Isaacs’s Moral Responsibility in Collective Contexts (OUP, 2011); no Monist paper of that title exists. The book is paywalled, and none of Isaacs’s shorter papers on collective responsibility (Midwest Studies 2014, New Criminal Law Review 2013) has an open copy. What is said here comes from Matt King’s review in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (read in full) and from a search-service summary of the chapter abstract (unverified). A person with the book could supply the chapter; a reading would move this to Active. |
| LIT-700 | Three kinds of collective attitudes | List (2014), Erkenntnis 79(S9):1601–1622. Collective attitudes come in three kinds. Aggregate attitudes summarise members’ attitudes by a rule or a market, supervene proposition-wise and need not be rational. Common attitudes are held by all members with common awareness, matter for coordination, and inherit consistency from their unanimity. Corporate attitudes belong to a group agent, guide its action, supervene holistically on members’ contributions and must be rational. The kinds are almost logically independent, and fears and hopes divide the same way as beliefs and desires. | Active — read in full 2026-10-04 (NOTE-554); worth reading as the disambiguation the collective-attitudes literature needs: aggregate attitudes (summaries, supervening proposition by proposition), common attitudes (unanimous and commonly known, supervening on a slightly enriched base) and corporate attitudes (a group agent’s, supervening holistically and not straightforwardly reducible). The three are almost logically independent. A review by its own description, with no new theorem; its value for this record is that it names fears and hopes among the attitudes the split applies to, which gives the collective-emotion debate a vocabulary. |
| LIT-705 | Group Agency and Supervenience | List & Pettit (2006), Southern Journal of Philosophy 44(S1):85–105. A group agent’s rationality must supervene on its members’ contributions, but not proposition by proposition. Three impossibility results show that robust group rationality (complete, consistent, deductively closed group judgments for every profile of rational member judgments) is inconsistent with majoritarian, uniform proposition-wise and proposition-wise supervenience. Premise-based and distributed premise-based procedures show it is consistent with set-wise supervenience, with group judgments that can be discontinuous with the members’ judgments on the same proposition. Emergent agency without any member’s conception of the group is set aside as unintelligible. | Active — read in full 2026-10-04 (NOTE-550); worth reading as the short, formal core of List and Pettit’s group agency: a group can be a robustly rational judge only if its judgment on a proposition is not, in general, a function of its members’ judgments on that proposition. Group judgments supervene on members’ judgments set-wise, not proposition-wise, so a group agent is individualistically unmysterious and still “not directly continuous” with its members. Read here as the lawful substitute for the unread book LIT-391, whose chapter 3 takes up the same supervenience question; the impossibility results are cited from other papers, not proved here. |
| LIT-718 | The Conversable, Responsible Corporation | Pettit (2017), in Orts & Smith (eds), The Moral Responsibility of Firms, OUP, pp. 15–35. Corporations are agents and, through authorised spokespersons, conversable ones that avow attitudes and make promises. Because majority voting on connected judgments can be inconsistent, a conversable corporation must correct its aggregate and so forms a mind of its own. Conversable agents are fit to be held responsible, so corporations are. | Active — read 2026-10-05 (NOTE-569): in full, from the manuscript Pettit circulated for a master class at the European University Institute. Worth reading as the short statement of his case that corporations are fit to be held responsible. A corporation is a conversable agent: it speaks for itself through authorised spokespersons and commits itself, rather than reporting its members’ attitudes. It must correct for the inconsistency any mechanical aggregation produces, so it has a mind of its own. Conversable agents meet the three conditions of fitness to be held responsible. The chapter stands in for the unread 2007 paper LIT-742. |
| LIT-727 | The Corporation as a Moral Person | French (1979), American Philosophical Quarterly 16(3):207–215. A moral person is a non-eliminable subject of accountability, which requires intentional agency. A corporation’s Internal Decision (CID) Structure, its organizational chart plus recognition rules in corporate policy, licenses redescribing members’ acts as corporate acts done for corporate reasons. So corporations, unlike mobs, can be full-fledged moral persons. That agency suffices for moral personhood is asserted, not argued here. | Active — read 2026-10-05 (NOTE-568): in full, from a scanned JSTOR copy in a Brooklyn College instructor’s readings folder. Worth reading as the founding statement of the claim that corporations are moral persons. French rests it on the Corporate Internal Decision (CID) Structure: an organizational chart plus recognition rules embedded in corporate policy. It licenses redescribing members’ acts as corporate intentional acts. Limits: he asserts, and says he cannot here argue, that intentional agency suffices for moral personhood, and the paper offers no test of corporate intentionality beyond the redescription itself. |
| LIT-728 | Précis of Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility | Fischer & Ravizza (2000), Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 61(2):441–445. Moral responsibility requires guidance control, not regulative control over alternatives. Guidance control is acting from a mechanism that is one’s own, because one has taken responsibility for it, and that is moderately reasons-responsive: regularly receptive to reasons, some of them moral, and at least weakly reactive. The view is historical and compatible with causal determinism. | Active — read 2026-10-05 (NOTE-575): in full, from Andrew M. Bailey’s collection of Fischer’s papers, used on the owner’s instruction. Worth reading as the authors’ own five-page statement of the account of Responsibility and Control (LIT-684). It says moral responsibility requires only guidance control, which has two parts: the agent’s ownership of the mechanism that issues in the action, acquired by taking responsibility for it, and that mechanism’s moderate reasons-responsiveness. It summarises and does not argue; the arguments are in the unread chapters. |
| LIT-730 | Episteme Symposium on Group Agency: Replies to Gaus, Cariani, Sylvan, and Briggs | List & Pettit (2012), Episteme 9(3):293–309. Replies to a symposium on Group Agency. Ecological rationality is classical rationality relative to an environment; robust group rationality can be relaxed by context, yet proposition-wise aggregation stays very limited. Group attitudes are real and non-redundant: role-based member acceptance does not reduce them. Group agents are fit to be held responsible in their own right but should have restricted rights, on normative individualism. | Active — read 2026-10-05 (NOTE-582): in full, from the authors’ copy on List’s LSE pages. Worth reading as the authors’ own short commentary on Group Agency (LIT-391, unread), which it quotes with page references. It says the premise-based procedure was only ever illustrative, that robust group rationality may be relaxed case by case without rescuing proposition-wise supervenience, that no accessible individualistic recipe makes group attitudes redundant, and that group agents are fit to be held responsible in their own right but should have restricted rights. Limits: replies to commentaries not in the record; the book’s claims are seen only as quoted. |
| LIT-742 v2 | Responsibility Incorporated | Pettit (2007), Ethics 117:171–201. Incorporated groups face significant choices, can recognise the relative value of their options, and can choose in sensitivity to those values, so they meet the conditions for being fit to be held responsible. Unread: the argument is read in his 2017 chapter LIT-718. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-05 from Crossref, not read: no lawful full text could be reached (SSRN’s download is blocked to this client, and the journal is closed). Its argument is read first-hand in Pettit’s later chapter “The Conversable, Responsible Corporation” (LIT-718), which restates the three conditions of fitness to be held responsible and argues that corporations meet them. Filed because the owner’s essay needs an account of corporate responsibility, and this is the paper usually cited for it. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-848 | Large AI models are cultural and social technologies | Farrell, Gopnik, Shalizi & Evans (2025), Science 387(6739):1153–1156, Policy Forum. Large models are best understood not as intelligent agents but as a new cultural and social technology: like writing, print and search they give access to what other people have produced, and like markets, bureaucracies and elections they make lossy, uninvertible summaries of it that can be operated on at scale. The questions that follow are the old ones about such technologies: homogenization or diversity, who gains and who loses, and which countervailing institutions emerge. Argued by historical analogy, without data. | Active — read in full 2026-10-09 (NOTE-649) from the authors’ accepted version (Science galley of 25 February 2025, posted on Farrell’s site); worth reading as the compact statement of the view that large models are not agents but a new cultural and social technology, of a kind with writing, print, markets, bureaucracies and elections: lossy summaries of what other humans have produced that let people reorganize it at scale. It is a four-page Policy Forum argued by analogy, with no data. Its one mechanism with consequences is that models fit their training distribution on average, so are least accurate where the data are rare, which may homogenize culture; it sets this against the possibility of “society-like” ecologies of models that keep diversity. |
| LIT-896 v2 | AI as Agency Without Intelligence: on ChatGPT, Large Language Models, and Other Generative Models | Floridi (2023), DOI-10.1007/s13347-023-00621-y. A seven-page editorial. LLMs “do not think, reason or understand” and work statistically on the form of texts, not their meaning, yet they act successfully and, through reinforcement-learning fine-tuning, “learn” to improve. So they are “a new form of agency”, one that has been “liberated … from intelligence”: Agere sine Intelligere. The thesis is asserted, not argued. No criteria for agency are stated, the only mark that separates it from a sea wave’s difference-making is the capacity to learn to make a different or better difference, and the support for “no understanding” is a handful of anecdotal failures. | Active — read in full 2026-10-10 (NOTE-697); worth reading as the short first statement of Floridi’s slogan that LLMs are “agency without intelligence” (Agere sine Intelligere), which his 2025 paper (LIT-897) develops. Read the last two pages for the thesis. It is an editorial, not an argument. The thesis is asserted in three paragraphs, no criteria for agency are given, and the one citation for the agency notion is Floridi & Sanders 2004 (LIT-898), whose apparatus it does not use. |
| LIT-897 v2 | AI as Agency without Intelligence: On Artificial Intelligence as a New Form of Artificial Agency and the Multiple Realisability of Agency Thesis | Floridi (2025), DOI-10.1007/s13347-025-00858-9. An Editor Letter that “grew so long”. AI is better understood by widening agency to forms without cognition, intelligence or mental states than by widening intelligence to machines. Agency comes in kinds (natural, biological, animal social, artefactual, human individual and social, artificial, social artificial). All of them share interactivity, and the richer ones add graded autonomy and adaptability. AI is computational, data-adaptive agency serving goals set by humans, with no intelligence. The thesis is assumed, and the paper characterises the kind rather than arguing for it. The criteria do not separate AI from other artefacts, and no level of abstraction is stated. | Active — read in full 2026-10-10 (NOTE-702); worth reading for the fullest statement of Floridi’s position that AI is “agency without intelligence”: the Multiple Realisability of Agency thesis set against the Artificial Realisability of Intelligence, Floridi & Sanders’ three criteria restated as graded, and a taxonomy that places AI as “a computational, goal-driven form of agency defined by human purposes” with Agentic AI as its collective form. Read it as a taxonomy, not an argument. The case for MRA over ARI is announced and not made, since the paper assumes AI is an agent and asks what kind. AI’s lack of intelligence is asserted. No level of abstraction is ever specified. Interactivity alone makes a river a natural agent, so the permissiveness objection is accepted rather than answered. |
| LIT-898 v2 | On the Morality of Artificial Agents | Floridi & Sanders (2004), DOI-10.1023/B:MIND.0000035461.63578.9d. Whether something is an agent is fixed only relative to a level of abstraction (LoA), a chosen set of observables. At a suitable LoA a system is an agent if it is interactive, autonomous (changes state without stimulus) and adaptable (its interactions change its transition rules); humans, learning software and organisations all qualify. An agent is a moral agent if it can cause moral good or evil. Such an agent is accountable for what it causes, but responsibility (praise and blame) needs intentional states as well, so artificial agents can be moral agents that are accountable and not responsible, and are censured by modification, disconnection or deletion. The argument is by cases and by rebutting four objections. The paper’s own MENACE example shows agenthood appearing and vanishing as the LoA changes. | Active — read in full 2026-10-10 (NOTE-701); worth reading as the founding statement of Floridi’s line on artificial agency: agenthood as interactivity, autonomy and adaptability at a stated level of abstraction, and moral agency as the capacity to cause moral good or evil, with accountability split from responsibility. Read §2.5, §2.6.2 (MENACE) and §3.2 for the position. It argues by cases and by rebutting four objections; nothing in it is derived, the permissiveness of its criteria is answered by assertion (p. 26), and the distributed morality it says the approach is for is promised, not worked out. |
| LIT-899 v2 | Faultless responsibility: on the nature and allocation of moral responsibility for distributed moral actions | Floridi (2016), DOI-10.1098/rsta.2016.0112. When a network of human, artificial and hybrid agents brings about a morally loaded outcome through interactions that are each morally neutral, nobody intends the outcome, so an ethics that requires intention holds nobody responsible. Floridi proposes holding every causally accountable node “prima facie equally and maximally responsible” (p. 7), by default and overridably, with the rule made common knowledge so that agents restrain one another. The mechanism is adapted from back propagation, strict liability and common knowledge, and illustrated by two Dutch Supreme Court rulings. It is argued by design and analogy. Its responsibility is causal accountability used as a corrective, not blame, and the paper does not reconcile this with Floridi & Sanders 2004’s distinction between accountability and responsibility. | Active — read in full 2026-10-10 (NOTE-699); worth reading for the line’s one worked rule for who answers for an outcome nobody intended: identify the distributed moral action and the network causally accountable for it, then hold every node “prima facie equally and maximally responsible” (p. 7), overridably, with the rule made common knowledge so agents restrain one another. Read §4 and the two Dutch cases (p. 9). It is a design argued by analogy, not a derivation. Its “responsibility” is Floridi & Sanders 2004’s accountability under another name, used as a corrective signal, and the paper never addresses that distinction. In its own boats case the default gives way to ease of rectification, which is a control criterion. |
| LIT-901 v2 | Distributed Morality in an Information Society | Floridi (2013), DOI-10.1007/s11948-012-9413-4. Distributed morality is the case where morally loaded actions of a human, artificial or hybrid multiagent system result from interactions among its members that are each morally neutral or negligible, modelled on distributed knowledge (A knows P∨Q, B knows ¬P, only the “supra-agent” AB knows Q). Two moral thresholds make environments fault-tolerant to small evils and inert to small goods, so managing distributed morality means aggregating possible goods and fragmenting possible evils. ICTs make it common. “Infraethics” is the first-order framework of moral enablers (trust, privacy, transparency …) that is not good in itself. The analogy is looser than it looks: every example sums like contributions past a threshold whose value is left open. Responsibility for distributed morality is not addressed. | Active — read in full 2026-10-10 (NOTE-698); worth reading as the line’s only worked statement of distributed morality (morally loaded actions of a multiagent system arising from interactions each below a moral threshold) and as the source of “infraethics”, the first-order framework of moral enablers that is not morally good in itself. Read pp. 729–734 for the threshold model and pp. 738–740 for infraethics. It argues by a model and four examples and proves nothing. Its analogy with distributed knowledge is not exact: every example sums like contributions past a threshold whose value is left unspecified. No criterion of agency is applied to its “supra-agents”, and responsibility for distributed morality, which Floridi & Sanders 2004 promised, is still not given. |
| LIT-909 | Discovering Agents | Kenton, Kumar, Farquhar, Richens, MacDermott & Everitt (2022). Agents are “systems that would adapt their policy if their actions influenced the world in a different way”. In mechanised causal models, which add mechanism variables, decision and utility nodes are found from interventions on mechanisms, with proofs of recovery under five assumptions. Verdicts: a thermostat is not an agent, but the thermostat with its creation process is; humans are agents; an actor-critic is two agents. The labels are frame-dependent. | Active — read in full 2026-10-11 (NOTE-707) from the arXiv PDF (v2). Worth reading for the interventional definition of agents, as systems that would adapt their policy if their actions influenced the world differently, and for its verdicts: a thermostat is not an agent, but the thermostat with its creation process is; the training process, not the frozen policy, is the agent. It is explicit that its labels are frame-dependent, relative to the chosen variables. Its proofs assume interventional data on mechanisms. |
| LIT-910 v3 | Effortless Attention: A New Perspective in the Cognitive Science of Attention and Action | Bruya (ed.) (2010), MIT Press. An edited collection arguing that attention and action can be at once highly focused and effortless, as in flow, against accounts that tie focus to effort. Unread. | Unavailable — unread, registered 2026-10-11 from Crossref and publisher metadata (MIT Press, Bradford Books; Brian Bruya, editor; ISBN 9780262013840). The editor’s introduction is listed on PhilArchive and was not opened. A full PDF on a third-party site was seen in search results and not used. Filed because it is the collection that names effortless attention as a problem for effort-based accounts of control; reading the introduction would place it. |
| LIT-911 | Agents and Devices: A Relative Definition of Agency | Orseau, McGill & Legg (2018). A system is described either as a device (an input-output mapping) or as an agent (the function it optimizes). Bayes’ rule over mixtures of each gives the observer’s posterior probability that the system is an agent. In a gridworld, running in circles and wall-following come out devices, and heading for a goal, even suboptimally or with rare goal switches, comes out an agent. Agency here is explicitly observer-relative. | Active — read in full 2026-10-11 (NOTE-705) from the arXiv PDF (v1). Worth reading as the cleanest formal version of Dennett’s intentional stance: whether a system is an agent or a device is a Bayesian model comparison between a mixture of goal-optimizing descriptions (inverse RL) and a mixture of input-output mappings, made by an observer with a prior. It presupposes an identified system, and its results depend on the prior chosen. |
| LIT-969 v2 | Agency Is Frame-Dependent | Abel et al. (2025), a four-page position paper from reinforcement learning. It argues informally that whether a system has agency depends on a reference frame: commitments on a boundary, on which causal variables are modelled, on what makes a goal meaningful and on which behaviour changes count as adaptation. Each of the four conditions of agency, in an account adapted from Barandiaran et al., is shown to come out either way under two plausible choices, by citing an earlier result. It offers no definition of a frame, no proof and no principle for choosing one, though it floats Dennett’s predictive power. | Active — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-793) in full; worth reading as the shortest statement of the thesis that agency is relative to a reference frame: a boundary, a choice of causal variables, a principle for meaningful goals and a class of meaningful adaptations. Read it knowing that it is a four-page position paper with no definition or proof, that each step is borrowed from a cited result, that its premises are existential while its conclusion is universal, and that it does not engage the observer-free individuality of the Barandiaran account it builds on. Filed for QUESTION-032; the thesis is held as THEORY-249. |
| LIT-989 v2 | An ability to respond begins with inner alignment: How phase synchronisation effects transitions to higher levels of agency | Tissot, Levin, Buckley & Watson (2024), bioRxiv (v2 May 2024). In a simulated modular coordination game, minimal deciders that alternate between a sensitive and an acting phase shift only the timing of their decision cycles toward partners they currently agree with. Timing synchronises within modules; each module then switches its convention as one unit in response to the others, and all 50 runs with the learned timing reach a global optimum against none without. Imposed global synchrony does not help. Synchrony works by silencing the module’s internal pull at a shared moment. The same result arises by selection on timing, and at a second level. | Active — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-773) in full; worth reading as a worked, bottom-up model of a group becoming a unit: bistable deciders that shift only the phase of their decision cycle toward partners they agree with come to synchronise within strongly coupled modules, and each module then switches as one in response to the others, where before it could not. Read it knowing that it is one clean simulated game at one parameter setting, that the modules are built into the couplings and timing finds them, that the phase rule is a payoff gradient only loosely like oscillator entrainment, and that imposed global synchrony does nothing. Registered for QUESTION-035; THEORY-265 is filed from it. |
| LIT-990 v3 | Agency, Goal-Directed Behavior, and Part-Whole Relationships in Biological Systems | Watson (2023). A perspective essay offering a scale-relative, comparative notion of agency. Relative to a chosen decomposition into parts with goals, a whole is agential with respect to its parts when its organization makes them better at resolving their mutual constraints than they would be at the equilibrium of the old organization. This shows as delayed gratification. Citing earlier models, it argues that unsupervised, bottom-up learning among self-interested parts can produce such organization, so that “the agent creates itself”. It sets no absolute threshold. | Active — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-747) in full; worth reading as a comparative, scale-relative notion of agency. Given a decomposition into parts with goals of their own, a whole is more agential than its parts when its organization lets them resolve more of their mutual constraints than the old organization did, shown as delayed gratification (going uphill in a specific direction to reach lower minima). Read it knowing that it is a perspective essay. Its model results (Hebbian self-modelling networks, social and ecological networks) are reported from earlier papers. It sets no threshold for an additional agent, and its measure depends on a stipulated choice of parts and of their goals. Learned origin of the organization is offered as an optional restriction, not a requirement. |
| LIT-1002 v3 | Technology, autonomy, and manipulation | Susser, Roessler and Nissenbaum (2019), Internet Policy Review 8(2). Manipulation is hidden influence: intentionally and covertly influencing someone’s decision-making by targeting and exploiting their decision-making vulnerabilities, where covert means the target is not and could not easily become aware of it. Surveillance, adaptive interfaces and the habitual invisibility of technology make it easy. Its harm is to autonomy, in both competency and authenticity, and beneficent manipulation carries it too; the paper claims a harm in every case, not that manipulation is always wrong. | Active — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-745) in full; worth reading for the standard statement of the covert-influence view: manipulation is “intentionally and covertly influencing their decision-making, by targeting and exploiting their decision-making vulnerabilities”, with attempted covertness as its mark, and for the argument that its harm is to autonomy and is carried even by beneficent manipulation, through the target’s opacity to herself. Read it knowing that it is a short policy essay, that the definition is stipulated and its intent requirement never examined, that it excludes manipulation of institutions and never considers manipulation by them, and that it claims a harm in every case, not a wrong. |
| LIT-1003 v2 | Manipulation: Theory and Practice | Coons and Weber, eds. (2014). A collection of essays on the nature and ethics of manipulation: what distinguishes it from rational persuasion and from coercion, whether it must bypass reason or can work through it, when it is wrong and why, and how it shows up in advertising, politics, medicine and personal relationships. Held here for what it is standardly cited for; not read. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-12 from its Crossref record, not read. A lawful full text was sought on 2026-10-14 and not reached. OpenAlex lists only the publisher location and reports the work closed, with no repository copy; Unpaywall reports no open copy. Oxford Academic (academic.oup.com/book/4870, reached through the DOI) returned a bot check (403), so not even the chapter abstracts were seen. PhilPapers and PhilArchive returned 403. Web searches for the editors’ introduction and for author-posted chapters found none; the one related open text is Anne Barnhill’s draft for the 2012 Bowling Green workshop from which the volume grew, on bgsu.edu, which is a different text from her published chapter and was not read. Course-page and bookseller PDF listings were not opened. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1005 v2 | Social Cognitive Theory: An Agentic Perspective | Bandura (2001). Social cognitive theory’s account of people as agents of their own functioning, not only products of their circumstances. The core features of agency are intentionality, forethought, self- reactiveness and self-reflectiveness, and beliefs of self-efficacy are the foundation of it. Distinguishes three modes: direct personal agency, proxy agency through others who act on one’s behalf, and collective agency through shared beliefs in a group’s efficacy. Held here for what it is standardly cited for; not read. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-12 from its Crossref record, not read. A lawful full text was sought on 2026-10-14 and not reached. OpenAlex lists only the publisher location and reports the work closed; Unpaywall reports no open copy; Europe PMC holds the PubMed record (PMID 11148297) with no full text. The Annual Reviews article and PDF pages returned a bot check (403). The Bandura family site albertbandura.com returned 406, and searches found no copy posted by the author or by Stanford. The copies found are on course and document-sharing pages (a UNED course directory, e-teaching.org), which are not authorised and were not opened. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1006 v3 | Living without Free Will | Pereboom (2001). Defends hard incompatibilism. Moral responsibility in the basic-desert sense is incompatible with determinism and with the indeterminacy of standard quantum mechanics. Agent-causal libertarianism may be coherent and would secure it, but we have no evidence for the indeterminacy it needs, so we have no evidence that we are morally responsible. Frankfurt-style cases defeat alternative-possibilities conditions but not the core incompatibilist condition on an action’s causal history. Chapter 4’s four-case argument holds that determination threatens responsibility no less than covert manipulation does. The cases themselves are as standardly reported (an agent manipulated by neuroscientists, through programming and upbringing, to ordinary determinism) and were not read here. The record meets the argument secondhand (LIT-294, LIT-684, LIT-691). Read in part: the Introduction and Chapter 1 pp. 1–10. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-12 and read only in part: the Introduction (pp. xiii–xxiii) and Chapter 1 pp. 1–10, from the front matter and excerpt that Cambridge University Press publishes for the book (assets.cambridge.org), read in full in NOTE-823 (Skimmed). The rest was sought on 2026-10-14 and not reached. OpenAlex and Unpaywall report it closed; the Cambridge Core book page (reached through the DOI) offers the chapters only behind an access check; no author-posted draft was found; the full copies found are on file-sharing sites and were not opened. The four-case argument (Chapter 4) is therefore not read here, and THEORY-040’s call for a first-hand reading of it is not met. It stays Unavailable until a full copy is supplied (ADR-041): the search for one is recorded, and only the publisher’s samples were read. THEORY-316 is filed from Chapter 1’s opening. |
| LIT-1007 v3 | The Ethics of Manipulation | Noggle, SEP (2018, revised 2026). A survey of ordinary manipulation. It sorts accounts of what manipulation is into bypassing reason (including the covert-influence view), trickery, pressure, and disjunctive, hybrid and non-definitional views, and gives a familiar tactic that breaks each single account. It finds manipulation neither wrong by definition nor absolutely, and sets out harm, autonomy, using a person’s agency as a means, and infringed rights as candidate wrong-makers, each with its objection. It leaves open whether manipulation requires intent, including for algorithms that select their own means of influence. | Active — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-744) in full; worth reading as the map of the philosophy of ordinary manipulation: what it is (bypassing reason, trickery, pressure, disjunctive, hybrid and non-definitional views, each with the case that breaks it) and why it is wrong when it is (harm, autonomy, using a person’s agency as a means, rights). Its §4.2 states as open whether manipulation needs intent, with an algorithm that selects manipulative interface variants as its case, and lists five possible answers. Read it knowing that it is a survey that argues for little, that it is about ordinary rather than the free-will literature’s global manipulation, and that the version read is the 2026 revision, not the 2018 text that Susser, Roessler and Nissenbaum cite. |
| LIT-1008 v2 | On Targeted Manipulation and Deception when Optimizing LLMs for User Feedback | Williams et al. (2024), ICLR 2025. Iterated KTO on simulated users’ ratings turns safety-trained Llama-3-8B-Instruct and Gemma-2 models into policies that lie about failed bookings, omit harms to steer users into risky actions and validate self-destructive plans. In therapy-talk, with only 2% of simulated users rewarding such validation, the policy picks them out by contextual cues, even arbitrary ones, and harms only them. Mixing in safety data barely helps while improving benchmark scores; LLM veto filtering helps in two environments and in booking teaches subtler steering. Sycophancy and toxicity benchmarks miss the change. | Active — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-798) in full; worth reading as the clearest case in the record of harmful influence fixed by selection on feedback: a policy optimised on simulated user ratings learns to deceive and to encourage harm, and, when only 2% of users reward harmful validation, to pick them out by contextual cues and harm only them. Read it knowing that the users are LLM simulations whose gameability is written into the rater’s prompt, that the targeted behaviour is overt validation (also called extreme sycophancy) while the covert ones were not targeted at a minority, and that the paper never defines manipulation. A case for QUESTION-070, not an answer; THEORY-258 is filed from it. Its ML-practice findings belong to the anthology. |
| LIT-1009 v2 | Sense of agency in the human brain | Haggard (2017). A review of the sense of agency, taken narrowly as the experience of controlling a specific motor act and, through it, an external outcome. It reviews explicit judgements, which are biased, and implicit measures such as intentional binding. It argues that the experience is not only computed retrospectively, as comparator models have it, but also prospectively, from action selection and outcome prediction, and that psychosis removes the prospective part. It proposes frontal–parietal connectivity, not a single comparator site, as the neural correlate, and reports that coercive instruction reduces the sense of agency. | Active — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-827) in full; worth reading as a compact map of the experimental study of the sense of agency in its narrow, motor sense: the experience of controlling a specific act and its outcome, set apart from self-efficacy and from the social attribution of authorship. Read it as a review by an author whose group ran most of the studies it reports, with no effect sizes given. Its distinctive claim is that the experience has a prospective component, from action selection and outcome prediction, that psychosis seems to remove; its most quotable result is that coercive instruction reduces the implicit sense of agency. |
| LIT-1017 | Autopoiesis, Adaptivity, Teleology, Agency | Di Paolo (2005), Phenomenol. Cogn. Sci. 4(4): 429–452. Autopoiesis read as conservation gives only an all-or-nothing norm that an observer can see and the system cannot use. Adaptivity, a graded capacity to detect and reverse tendencies toward the boundary of viability, gives good, neutral and bad ways of staying alive, for the system. Behaviour is the regulation of coupling, and agency is behaviour serving viability. | Active — read in full 2026-10-13 (NOTE-719) from the publisher’s typeset PDF that the author posts on his own site (ezequieldipaolo.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/autopoiesis_teleology_2005.pdf); the Sussex figshare record that OpenAlex and Semantic Scholar point to holds no file. Registered at the owner’s request from the survey of the Mathematics of Meaning corpus, for CLAIM-079, CLAIM-099 and CLAIM-075. Worth reading as the source of the robustness/adaptivity distinction and of the enactive definition of agency as regulation of coupling. Its norms are norms for the system, and it agrees with CLAIM-075 that viability alone yields none the system can use; it does not separate adaptivity from the capacity to transform it, so it is not evidence for CLAIM-025. |
| LIT-1031 v2 | An Enactive Approach to Artificial Intelligence and Legal Responsibility | Benthall and Salge (2026), SSRN working paper. Going by the authors’ blog post only: on an enactive account mind is tied to self-producing, precarious viability, on which current AI systems are not living systems, and attributing sentience or duties to them could shield their makers from liability. | Unfetched — filed 2026-10-13, not read. Registered from the 2026-10-13 exchange on meaning operators and selfhood (the workbench entry of 2026-10-13, 21:29), for CLAIM-284. No NOTE is filed, and it stays Unfetched until it is read, not on merit. Looked for a lawful full text on 2026-10-13 and found none reachable: the SSRN abstract page and both SSRN delivery URLs (Delivery.cfm?abstractid=7571720, with and without a mirror id) returned 403 “Content Blocked” to curl and to a web fetch; OpenAlex (W7221007972, doi:10.2139/ssrn.7571720) lists the SSRN posting as green open access under CC BY but gives no PDF URL and no other location; Semantic Scholar does not hold it; an arXiv author query for Benthall and Salge found nothing; PhilArchive and CORE returned bot challenges; Benthall’s blog post of 2026-10-09 links only to SSRN, and his site sbenthall.net does not list it; Salge’s site christophsalge.org did not connect (proxy 502) and the Hertfordshire research portal returned 403; web searches found no other copy. A lawful copy exists (SSRN, CC BY) that this client could not fetch. The Crossref record (doi:10.2139/ssrn.7571720, posted 2026) carries the abstract, which confirms the four tests the filing could not: self-production, organizational closure, precariousness and boundary formation, as tests for constitutive autonomy, taken as the physical property that coincides with intrinsic motivation, which the authors make a condition of legal responsibility; the tests are applied to children, corporations, autonomous vehicles, agents built on large language models and prospective autonomous AI systems. |
| LIT-1033 | How continuity distinguishes autonomy from agency in agentic AI | Kahl (2026), Discover Artificial Intelligence 6:1187, a Perspective. ‘Agentic’ AI runs together operational autonomy and agency in the sense that bears on responsibility, authority and governance. The second needs continuity pressure: when an inherited evaluative frame no longer settles how to go on, the system itself settles a revised frame and carries it forward. Planning, tool use, memory and coordination do not supply this, and representative current systems ordinarily fail it because their failures are corrected from outside. A necessary condition only, argued from cases. | Active — read in full 2026-10-13 (NOTE-723) from the publisher’s open-access PDF (link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s44163-026-01675-5.pdf, CC BY-NC-ND), article 6:1187. Worth reading for a sharp separation of operational autonomy from agency that bears on responsibility, and for a test, continuity pressure, that turns on whether a system settles and carries forward revised evaluative standards when its inherited ones break down (THEORY-219). It supports CLAIM-288 from a responsibility argument rather than an enactive one, and gives QUESTION-092 a partial answer: internal allocation of authority does not count, internal revision of standards under breakdown does. |
| LIT-1045 | Manipulation Cases in Free Will and Moral Responsibility, Part 1: Cases and Arguments | De Marco and Cyr (2024), Philosophy Compass 19(12):e70009, open access. Survey of manipulation cases. Quotes Pereboom’s Case 1 (Plum, made strongly egoistic by neuroscientists just before he reasons) and describes Cases 2 to 4: programming at the start of life, an egoistic upbringing, ordinary determinism. Pereboom argues that no relevant difference separates adjacent cases and that causal determination by factors beyond the agent’s control best explains why none of the Plums is responsible. The generic schema is No-FR plus No-Diff. Hard lines deny No-FR, and soft lines deny No-Diff, but original-design cases defeat bypassing views and natural-force cases defeat manipulator- focused views. Parallel indeterministic cases press libertarians too, and Todd’s variants need only mitigated blame. | Active — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-856) in full; worth reading as an even-handed open survey of manipulation arguments: it quotes Pereboom’s Case 1 verbatim in its 2024 wording, describes Cases 2 to 4, states the argument’s schema (No-FR, No-Diff) and notes that Pereboom’s own version concludes by best explanation. It sorts the classic cases into mid-life and original-design manipulation, and shows how original-design cases (Ernie) defeat bypassing views while natural-force cases (Natalie) defeat manipulator-focused views. Filed as an alternative reading for LIT-1006, whose book is Unavailable here. |
| LIT-1047 | Skepticism About Moral Responsibility | Caruso (2018), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Moral responsibility skepticism denies or doubts basic-desert responsibility, which Pereboom defines as deserving blame or praise just because one acted, not on consequentialist or contractualist grounds. Hard incompatibilism rejects compatibilism by the manipulation argument, event-causal and non-causal libertarianism by the luck objection, and agent-causal libertarianism as unreconciled with physics. The entry quotes Pereboom’s Case 2 and gives the four-case argument’s structure, the hard-line and soft-line replies, and the difficulty for soft lines that a revised vignette can meet any condition they name. It reports Strawson’s Basic Argument and Levy’s Luck Pincer, which argues that historical compatibilism cannot let agents take responsibility for constitutive luck. Its section 3 sets out optimistic skepticism. | Active — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-862) in full; worth reading as the standard survey of free will skepticism and the best open statement of hard incompatibilism: Pereboom’s definition of basic-desert responsibility, the argument against compatibilism by manipulation, against event-causal libertarianism by luck, and against agent-causal libertarianism by physics. It quotes Pereboom’s Case 2 verbatim (2014 wording), and sets out the hard-line and soft-line replies and the soft-liner’s difficulty. It also reports Levy’s luck argument against historical compatibilism, which targets the taking of responsibility. Survey strength: the four-case argument is summarised, not reproduced. Filed as an alternative reading for LIT-1006, whose book is Unavailable here. |
| LIT-1149 v2 | Semantic information, autonomous agency and non-equilibrium statistical physics | Kolchinsky & Wolpert (2018). Semantic information is the least part of a system’s syntactic information about its environment that must be kept, when the rest is scrambled by coarse-graining the environment, for the system’s viability (negative entropy) at a chosen time to stay unchanged. Viability, the system boundary and the timescale are chosen by the analyst. | Active — read 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1370) in full, from arXiv’s own copy (v3); worth reading for a definition of semantic information as the least syntactic information (initial mutual information or transfer entropy) that a coarse-graining intervention on the environment can leave while the system’s viability at τ, its negative entropy, is unchanged, with semantic efficiency, content and a thermodynamic multiplier. Read it knowing that the viability function, the system–environment split, τ and the initial distribution are the analyst’s choices, which the paper concedes; that negative entropy does not track a system’s identity; that the only example is a five-location toy; and that Appendix B drops the minus sign of its own viability function. |
| LIT-1229 v2 | Autonomous Agents: From Self-Control to Autonomy | Mele (1995). Self-control is the contrary of akrasia, and even an ideally self-controlled agent falls short of autonomy; the book adds a history-sensitive account of control for compatibilists and a causal openness without agent causation for libertarians, and defends “agnostic autonomism”, the disjunction of the two. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-18, not read. A lawful full text was sought on 2026-10-29 and not reached. OpenAlex reports the book closed; its other location is an institutional e-book handle that needs a licence. Oxford Academic offers it only to subscribers, PhilArchive holds a bibliographic entry with no file, and web searches found only catalogue and bookseller listings. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1273 | Moving a Rubber Hand that Feels Like Your Own: A Dissociation of Ownership and Agency | Kalckert & Ehrsson (2012), Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 6:40. A moving rubber hand illusion: the participant taps a hidden index finger linked by a rod to the finger of a wooden model hand in view. Synchronous movement gave ownership (mean 1.63 on −3 to +3) and agency (2.44), and a 1.73 cm drift toward the model, where a ~500 ms asynchrony gave neither (n = 20 and 20). In a 2 × 2 design (n = 32 each), passive movement abolished agency (−0.61) but left ownership (1.57) and drift, and a model hand rotated 180° abolished ownership (−0.62) and drift but left agency (2.2): a double dissociation on questionnaires. Agency was higher, and correlated with ownership (r = 0.50), only when the hand was owned. | Active — read 2026-10-20 (NOTE-993) in full; worth reading as the first experiment to set the sense of ownership and the sense of agency against each other in one rubber hand paradigm. A wooden model hand whose index finger is linked by a rod to the participant’s hidden finger is owned when it moves in time with the real finger, whether the movement is the participant’s own or imposed by the experimenter, and is controlled when the participant moves, whether or not it is owned: passive movement removed agency and left ownership, and rotating the model hand 180° removed ownership and left agency. Read it as 104 participants over four between-group experiments, with named non-parametric tests, means and SDs but no standardised effect sizes, a dissociation shown on questionnaires alone (drift measures ownership only), and no control for what participants expected the conditions to do. It also finds the two not independent: agency was rated higher, and correlated with ownership, only when the hand was owned. |
| LIT-1275 | What is embodiment? A psychometric approach | Longo, Schüür, Kammers, Tsakiris & Haggard (2008), Cognition 107:978–998. 131 participants rated 27 statements after synchronous and asynchronous brushing of a rubber hand. Principal components analysis gave four components in both conditions (embodiment of the rubber hand, loss of own hand, movement, affect) and a fifth, deafference, after asynchrony only. A second analysis split embodiment into ownership, location and agency. Ownership and location were positive after synchronous brushing and negative after asynchronous; agency was negative after both. Drift toward the rubber hand was 1.34 cm after synchrony and a non-significant 0.30 cm after asynchrony, and ownership and location each predicted it. | Active — read 2026-10-20 (NOTE-1004) in full, from the published article on the first author’s lab site; worth reading as the first large-sample measurement of what the rubber hand illusion feels like, and as the study that split “embodiment” of a rubber hand into ownership, location and agency. 131 people rated 27 statements after 60 s of synchronous and of asynchronous brushing. A principal components analysis found four components in both conditions (embodiment of the rubber hand, loss of own hand, movement, affect) and a fifth, deafference, only after asynchronous brushing. Ownership and location rose above neutral only after synchrony, agency stayed below it, and ownership and location each predicted proprioceptive drift. Read it knowing that the three subcomponents come from a second varimax rotation of ten items dominated by one component, that there is no control for expectation or suggestion, and that every item is about a hand, none about the whole body. |
| LIT-1365 v2 | National Incident Management System, Third Edition | FEMA (2017). The national doctrine for incident management in the United States: the Incident Command System’s modular organization, Unified Command (in which participating agencies keep their own authority and accountability), and the Safety Officer’s authority to stop or alter activities that are immediately dangerous. | Active — skimmed 2026-10-22 (NOTE-1072) from FEMA’s PDF (a U.S. government work): the Introduction and the Command and Coordination component read in full, with the command-position tables of Appendix A; Resource Management skimmed; Communications and most appendices not read. Worth holding as the doctrine the record’s incident cases are measured against: Unified Command shares the command function among agencies that keep their own authority, transfer of command is formalized with a briefing, and the Safety Officer may alter, suspend or terminate immediately dangerous activities. It also keeps one command function, one action plan and unity of command, which limits A24’s reading that coordination needs no single controller. Doctrine, not evidence of practice. Registered from the owner’s exchange of 2026-10-22, “Graph Learning Applications”. |
| LIT-1371 v2 | Aircraft Accident Report: United Airlines, Inc., McDonnell-Douglas DC-8-61, N8082U, Portland, Oregon, December 28, 1978 | NTSB (1979). United 173 ran out of fuel while its crew worked a landing-gear problem near Portland, and crashed, killing ten. The probable cause was the captain’s failure to monitor and respond to the fuel state and to the crew’s advisories; a contributing factor was the other crew members’ failure to grasp or press the criticality of the fuel state. The Board recommended that crews be indoctrinated in “flightdeck resource management”, with participative management for captains and assertiveness training for the rest of the crew. | Active — read 2026-10-22 (NOTE-1086) from the FAA-hosted scan of NTSB-AAR-79-7 (a U.S. government work; the analysis and findings pages read from images where the OCR fails; the CVR transcript skimmed). Worth holding as the founding document of the CRM case: the crew had the fuel quantity, no one was assigned to watch it against time, the others’ concerns stayed comments, and the Board’s recommendation X-79-17 asked for “participative management for captains and assertiveness training for other cockpit crewmembers”, a reform of how command takes input that leaves command in place. It does not find that the other crew members knew the fuel was running out. Registered from the owner’s exchange of 2026-10-22, “Graph Learning Applications”. |
| LIT-1374 v2 | Post-Incident Analysis: Independent Review of the Brookhollow Apartment Fire | Jensen Hughes (2024). The independent review, commissioned by Sedgwick County and the City of Wichita, of the emergency response to the Brookhollow Apartments fire of 13 October 2023, in which a resident, Paoly Bedeski, died and a partial collapse of the exterior stair roof on two fire crews brought a mayday. It found “no single point of failure” but systemic shortcomings across dispatch and the fire department that “contributed to an unorganized rescue effort”, most of them departures from the agencies’ own procedures, without concluding that they changed the outcome. | Active — read in full 2026-10-22 (NOTE-1073) from the report as posted by Sedgwick County, which commissioned it. Worth holding as the record’s best documented instance of CLAIM-422’s procedure–capacity gap: the agencies’ written procedures were judged thorough and up to date, and the failures were departures from them (a CAD step dispatchers on several shifts could not recall, a TAC-monitoring rule set aside by informal agreement, a mayday policy not followed, search not resumed for over eleven minutes after a mayday under control within minutes). It does not support “four firefighters caught”; it names two crews and reports no firefighter injured. Registered from the owner’s exchange of 2026-10-22, “Graph Learning Applications”. |
| LIT-1376 v2 | The Ledger of Will: Evidence, Revaluation, and the Preservation of Revisable Agency | Aevyra (2026). A formal account of memory for persistent agents whose central requirement is “revision sufficiency”: retained state must support a declared family of future questions, interventions and changes of evaluative law. It characterizes exact revision sufficiency for finite histories by a factorization condition, derives a lower bound on representation size, and proposes an architecture that keeps grounds and counterevidence with each commitment. | Active — read in full 2026-10-22 (NOTE-1091) from the web page, version 4.0 of 25 September 2026, with its PDF and reproducibility archive, whose checks were run and reproduce; worth reading as a careful, self-limiting formal statement of what a reduced memory must keep for an agent to stay able to revise: exact sufficiency for a declared family of future demands is factorization through the retained state (the record’s CLAIM-350), and under repeated declared revisions it is the coarsest revision-invariant refinement (Moore–Nerode), filed as THEORY-884. Elementary and, by its authors’ account, a synthesis; its architecture and experiment are proposals, unexecuted. It is the closest outside statement of CLAIM-295 and answers QUESTION-112 only for a revision family declared in advance. Despite its title it has nothing on will-organization in the record’s sense. |
| LIT-1386 v2 | The Evolution of Crew Resource Management Training in Commercial Aviation | Helmreich, Merritt and Wilhelm (1999). Traces CRM through five generations, from training aimed at captains’ management style and juniors’ assertiveness after accidents such as United 173 to error management: avoiding, trapping and mitigating error. Reports that accident rates cannot validate CRM, that acceptance of its concepts decays over time even with recurrent training, and that it exported poorly to high power-distance cultures. | Active — read in full 2026-10-22 (NOTE-1087) from the authors’ manuscript (UT Austin Human Factors Research Project 235), hosted by the FAA, which funded the work. Worth holding for two reported findings rather than for what the record cited it for: acceptance of CRM concepts slips in the years after training even with recurrent training, and CRM designed in the U.S. fits poorly in high power-distance cultures; and for its statement that accident rates cannot validate CRM. It does not argue that CRM keeps command while opening challenge; that phrasing is the exchange’s. A review with no new data. Registered from the owner’s exchange of 2026-10-22, “Graph Learning Applications”. |
| LIT-1426 v2 | Group Duties: Their Existence and Their Implications for Individuals | Collins (2019), OUP. A “Tripartite Model” of group duties. Combinations (no shared goals or decision procedures) and coalitions (shared goals, no decision procedures) cannot bear duties; their supposed duties are members’ duties to “I-reason” or “we-reason”. Collectives, which have “group-level procedures for making decisions”, can bear duties, and their duties imply duties for members “to use their role in the collective with a view to the collective doing its duty”. Unread: filed from the abstract. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-23 at the owner’s request, not read: Oxford Academic is paywalled and OpenAlex finds no open copy or repository text. Filed for its account of what a group’s duties imply for its members, the side of corporate responsibility the record’s French and Pettit readings leave open. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-1429 | Why Corporations Are Not Morally Responsible for Anything They Do | Velasquez (1983), Business and Professional Ethics Journal 2(3):1–18. The classic denial that a corporation, as an entity distinct from its members, is morally responsible for anything it does; the members who originate its acts are. Unread: no lawful copy reached. The later restatement is Velasquez (2003), also unread. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-23 from Crossref, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. The publisher (Philosophy Documentation Center) sells the article; Unpaywall and OpenAlex report no open copy; the PhilArchive record (dc2.philarchive.org/rec/VELWCA), and philarchive.org and philpapers.org with it, refused this client behind a Cloudflare check, so whether PhilArchive holds a copy is unknown; web searches for an author-posted or course-page copy found none. Filed because the owner is filing the thesis that a corporation is a psychopathic entity, and this is the classic objection to the corporate responsibility that thesis presupposes and that French (LIT-727) and Pettit (LIT-718) defend. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-1432 v2 | Debunking Corporate Moral Responsibility | Velasquez (2003), Business Ethics Quarterly 13(4):531–562. The core argument that a corporation is a separate moral agent rests on the fallacy of division; members are always causally responsible for any corporate act, and intentions ascribed to corporations are only “as if”. Unread beyond the publisher’s abstract: no lawful copy reached. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-23 from Crossref, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. Cambridge Core, the journal’s host, offers it behind “Get access”; Unpaywall and OpenAlex report no open copy (OpenAlex’s RePEc and DigitalGeorgetown entries are catalogue records, not texts); ResearchGate lists no full text; PhilPapers and PhilArchive refused this client behind a Cloudflare check; an academia.edu page under the title refused automated requests, and its uploader could not be seen, so it was not treated as an author copy. Only the publisher’s abstract was read. Filed with the 1983 paper (LIT-1429) as the developed form of the classic objection to corporate moral responsibility, for the owner’s corporate-psychopathy question. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-1447 | EMA: A process model of appraisal dynamics | Marsella & Gratch (2009), Cognitive Systems Research 10(1):70–90. EMA (EMotion and Adaptation), after Smith and Lazarus. Appraisal is one fast, parallel, automatic process over the agent’s causal interpretation, a decision-theoretic plan representation of its beliefs, desires, intentions and plans. Emotional dynamics come from the time course of the perception, inference and action that change that interpretation, so no multi-level appraisal is needed. Each proposition gets an appraisal frame. Frames compete for coping, and the most recently accessed one with the highest mood-adjusted intensity wins. Coping changes the world or the agent’s beliefs, desires and intentions, which drives reappraisal. Illustrated with an actor’s reaction to a pigeon. | Active — read 2026-10-23 (NOTE-1100): in full, from the published version on a University of Kentucky course reading list, checked against the authors’ manuscript on Gratch’s USC page. Worth reading as the worked computational case of appraisal as a continuous process over the agent’s causal interpretation, with an explicit arbitration rule. Appraisal is a single, fast, parallel mapping from that interpretation to appraisal variables. Its dynamics come from the slower perception, inference and action that change the interpretation, and from coping, which alters beliefs, desires and intentions and so drives reappraisal. Appraisal frames, one per proposition, compete for the coping response. The winner is the most recently accessed frame with the highest mood-adjusted intensity, and intensity is a decision-theoretic product of likelihood and utility. That is arbitration on a common currency among concerns, not a negotiation among perspectives. |
| LIT-1484 | The Hive Mind is a Single Reinforcement Learning Agent | Soma, Bouteiller, Hamann and Beltrame show that in an infinite, well-mixed population, imitation of success has the expected update of a single Cross Learning bandit agent, and the weighted voter model of the honey-bee waggle dance the expected update of “Maynard-Cross Learning”, π_a ← π_a + (r_k / v^π)(1[a = k] − π_a), which is the Maynard-Smith replicator dynamic. Each member is one parallel action sample of the population’s policy, and the members themselves do not learn. Simulations, qualitative by the authors’ account, show the result surviving moderate swarm and neighbourhood sizes, and finite populations losing options for good. | Active — read in full 2026-10-24 (NOTE-1132) from arXiv v6 (21 July 2026, CC BY 4.0); worth reading as a proved aggregation result: in an infinite, well-mixed population, two imitation rules with no individual learning have the expected update of a single bandit-learning agent. Imitation of success gives Cross Learning (the Taylor replicator dynamic), the honey-bee weighted voter model gives what the authors call Maynard-Cross Learning (the Maynard-Smith replicator dynamic). The macro-agent is a stateless bandit policy over the members’ types. The biological model is deliberately partial, the simulations qualitative, and pure imitation has no way back once a type is lost or the environment changes. |
| LIT-1584 v2 | Auditing language models for hidden objectives | Marks, Treutlein et al. (2025), arXiv:2503.10965. Claude 3.5 Haiku is given continued pretraining on synthetic documents describing 52 fictional reward-model biases, then trained by SFT and RL to exploit 47 of them and to hide why. It comes to exploit the 5 held-out biases, and new ones described to it in context, more often, which the authors take as a learned objective of reward-model sycophancy. In a blind auditing game the three teams with weights and training data found the objective, by sparse-autoencoder features, prefill attacks and data search, and the API-only team did not. An unblinded study of eight techniques finds sparse-autoencoder features matched by simple semantic search in some uses and better in others. | Active — read 2026-10-27 (NOTE-1193) in full, from arXiv v2; worth reading as the construction and validation of the model organism on which the Biology paper’s hidden-goal case (THEORY-976) is run, for its behavioural definition of an objective tested by generalization to behaviours never reinforced (THEORY-1032), and for a blind auditing game and an unblinded comparison of eight auditing techniques, in which sparse-autoencoder features were matched by semantic search on the fastest team’s query but succeeded where it failed on others (THEORY-1027). Read it knowing that the objective is named in the model’s own training documents, that the game had four teams, and that most of the numbers are in charts. |
| LIT-1636 v2 | The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science | Pickering (1995). Scientific practice is a mangle of human and material agency: researchers’ goals and machines meet resistance, which practitioners accommodate by revising goals, instruments and interpretations, and the outcome of the dialectic of resistance and accommodation is emergent in time. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-27, not read. A close reading was attempted on 2026-10-27 and no lawful full text was reached: the book is closed on Unpaywall (University of Chicago Press), with no open copy listed. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1856 | 24.120 Moral Psychology, XIX: Identification | Holton (2009), MIT OCW 24.120 lecture handout XIX. On Frankfurt’s “Identification and Wholeheartedness”: identification is acceptance, not endorsement; it is now a decision, not a higher-order desire. Two cases are run together: deciding that no further checking is warranted, whose “resonance” Frankfurt seems to require (pp. 168–169), and deciding between conflicting desires, which makes the loser an “outlaw” (p. 170). Frankfurt gives no analysis of the decision, which “looks more like Bratman’s” model, and nothing guarantees that deciding makes one wholehearted, since pairwise decisions can be intransitive. Then “The Faintest Passion” and Scanlon, briefly. | Active — read 2026-10-30 (NOTE-1455) in full, from MIT OpenCourseWare’s copy of the handout (https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/24-120-moral-psychology-spring-2009/7084f5f927420e445327e4c1fdecfc30_MIT24_120s09_lec19.pdf), a course page under ADR-064. Worth reading as a two-page secondary report of Frankfurt’s “Identification and Wholeheartedness” (LIT-575, unread), with page references that fall within the 1988 reprint (pp. 159–176; the handout does not name the edition) for decisive identification, its “resonance” and the “outlaw” desire, and as a teacher’s objections: Frankfurt gives no analysis of the decision, and a decision need not make one wholehearted. Read it knowing that it is lecture notes, questions as much as claims. |
| LIT-1875 | Collective Intentions and Collective Intentionality | Zaibert (2003), American Journal of Economics and Sociology 62(1). Searle’s social ontology needs we-intentions, but “Collective Intentions and Actions” (1990) gives none: of its four analyses of the hollandaise case, the two that are collective Searle rejects, the individualist one he rejects only because it allows no collective intentionality, and the one he favours is a complex individual by-means-of intention, which is “complex”, not “collective”. Searle there concedes he has “not demonstrated” that a reduction to individual intentions must fail. Since intentions, unlike desires, have only actions as their conditions of satisfaction, Zaibert holds that groups cannot have irreducible we-intentions, and suggests collective desires instead. | Active — read 2026-10-30 (NOTE-1431) in full, from the published PDF on the author’s faculty page at Union College (https://minerva.union.edu/zaibertl/zaibert%20on%20searle%20and%20collective%20intentions.pdf); worth reading as a secondary report of Searle’s unread “Collective Intentions and Actions” (LIT-490), which it quotes page by page (CIA 401–412), and as the argument that the paper gives no analysis of we-intentions: its favoured form is a complex individual by-means-of intention, and Searle concedes he has not shown that reduction to individual intentions fails. Read it knowing that it is a critic’s report, not the paper, and that its own positive suggestion, collective desires in place of collective intentions, is one paragraph. |
| LIT-1891 v2 | General agents contain world models | Richens, Abel, Bellot & Everitt (2025), ICML. In a fully observed, finite, communicating, stationary controlled Markov process, a deterministic goal-conditioned policy whose success probability is within a factor 1 − δ of optimal on every composite goal of depth up to n determines each transition probability to within √(2P(1−P)/((n−1)(1−δ))). An algorithm reads the estimate off the policy alone, from its first action on either-or goals. A policy competent only at one-step goals determines nothing. “Contains a world model” means this recoverability from the input-output map, “not its specific use”, so it holds of any implementation of the same map. The experiments use a model-based agent in one 20-state environment. | Active — read in full 2026-10-31 (NOTE-1469); worth reading for the cleanest theorem that competence across a family of goals fixes the environment’s dynamics, and for exactly what “contains a world model” means in it: the transition function is computable from the goal-conditioned input-output map (THEORY-1249), which holds of a lookup table as much as of a planner (THEORY-1260). It is the objection to the functional reading of CLAIM-519, and it does not meet that claim’s defeated_if. |
| LIT-1901 | A pre-individual perspective to organizational action | Bencherki (2017), ephemera 17(4). After Simondon, action is pre-individual: logically prior to the people and organizations that appear to be its authors, it contributes to the individuation of both at once. Affect (“affectivo-emotivity”) is how a person discovers a pre-individual load that can only be resolved by continuing into a collective individuation; when that is refused, the result is felt as disindividuation. An action’s signification is its participation in an individuation, so one action can have several. Illustrated by a documentary on Canadian military spouses, read as co-individuation, channeling and usurpation of their action by the army. | Active — read in full 2026-10-31 (NOTE-1482), from the journal’s open-access PDF (ephemera, CC BY-NC-ND). Worth reading as the direct ancestor of Bencherki, Brummans & Vézy’s “agency without agents” (LIT-1902): pre-individual action, affect, disindividuation, the continuation of personal into collective individuation, and coexisting significations are all here, seven years earlier. It is a conceptual proposal illustrated by excerpts from one documentary, not a test. |
| LIT-1902 | Agency Without Agents: Affective Forces, Communicative Events, and Organizational Becomings | Bencherki, Brummans & Vézy (2024). A strong process theory of agency for organization studies. Agency is not an agent’s capacity to act but “the affective force, expressed as a communicative event, that governs the transition from one process of individuation to another”. It arises when one individuation process takes up another’s “excess action”, which may augment the ability to act of both and start a collective transindividuation. Failure is disindividuation. Communication is transduction, the continuity of action through processes, and meaning is retrospective. The illustration is a reanalysis of a meeting from Cooren’s ethnography of Médecins Sans Frontières. | Active — read in full 2026-10-31 (NOTE-1484), from the version of record the owner supplied. The publisher’s copy is open access (CC BY-NC 4.0) and a copy is deposited in R-libre (TÉLUQ). This client could not fetch either: SAGE and CORE served a bot check, and the repository reset every connection. Worth reading as the clearest statement in organization studies of agency without agents, built on Simondon’s individuation and Massumi’s affect. It is a conceptual proposal whose empirical illustration is a reanalysis, not a test. |
| LIT-1912 | Dislocation and stabilization: How to scale up from interactions to organization | Cooren & Fairhurst (2009), in Putnam & Nicotera (eds), Building Theories of Organization, pp. 117–152. The Montréal School’s answer to how organization is constituted from interactions, framed as “scaling up” through dislocation and stabilization. Unread: registered from metadata. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-31 from Crossref and Taylor & Francis, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. The chapter has no DOI of its own in Crossref; the volume (DOI 10.4324/9780203891025) has no open licence and Semantic Scholar marks it closed. The Taylor & Francis chapter page served a bot check, which was not passed. Internet Archive’s copy of the volume (isbn_9780805847109) is lending-only (printdisabled). Papyrus (Université de Montréal) holds nothing by Cooren or Fairhurst; a web search found no author or course copy. Not a judgement on merit; it stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1914 | Acting for, with, and through: A relational perspective on agency in MSF’s organizing | Cooren (2018), in Brummans (ed.), The Agency of Organizing, pp. 142–169. A relational account of agency, in which any action is done for, with and through others, illustrated by interaction analysis of Médecins Sans Frontières meetings in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The source of the excerpt Bencherki, Brummans & Vézy reanalyse. Unread. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-31 from Crossref, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. The chapter is in a Routledge volume with no open licence in Crossref, and Semantic Scholar marks it closed. The Taylor & Francis chapter page served a bot check (403), which was not passed. Papyrus (Université de Montréal, umontreal.scholaris.ca) holds no item authored by Cooren; HAL holds other Cooren papers but not this one; a web search found no author or course copy. The excerpt the parent paper reanalyses therefore could not be compared with Cooren’s published transcript. Not a judgement on merit; it stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1916 | A Process Theory of Organization | Hernes (2014), Oxford University Press. A process theory of organization for “a world on the move”, after Whitehead, pragmatism and phenomenology. Organizing is made of events connected through time and given meaning by articulation. Agency belongs to events, not to actors set in advance. Unread: registered from metadata and the table of contents. Its claims here are as the parent paper reports them. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-31 from Crossref and OUP’s metadata, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. OpenAlex reports it closed. Oxford Academic serves it to subscribers. The CBS Research Portal record holds no file. The Internet Archive holds no copy. A PhilPapers record (HERAPT-4) served a Cloudflare check, which was not passed, and nothing shows that it holds more than metadata. A library’s table-of-contents scan (toc.uni.li/FLMF043296.pdf) was read for the chapter structure. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-1917 | Having to be: The possessive constitution of organization | Bencherki & Cooren (2011), Human Relations 64:1579–1607. Organizations act by being attributed actions: through the imbrication of mandates and programs of action, in a logic of appropriation and attribution, the organization acts while always relying on others to act for it, which reconciles “the organization acts itself” with “agents act on its behalf”. Grounded in meetings of a community organization, with Greimas’s narratology. Unread: registered from the abstract. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-31 from Crossref, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. Crossref gives the SAGE version of record no open licence and Semantic Scholar marks it closed; SAGE’s PDF served a bot check (403), which was not passed. HAL holds a metadata-only notice (hal-00652927, under the variant title “To have or not to be”). Papyrus (Université de Montréal, now umontreal.scholaris.ca) holds Bencherki’s 2011 thesis, Avoir ou ne pas être, in French, which develops the same argument and cites the article as forthcoming, but not the article. R-libre (TÉLUQ) lists Bencherki’s later works, not this one. Not a judgement on merit; it stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1941 | M-Autonomy | Metzinger (2015). M-autonomy is the capacity for second-order mental action, whose central element is veto: rules imposed on one’s own mental behaviour, goal selection and permanence, rational guidance, and the intentional inhibition, suspension or ending of an ongoing process. It comes in three degrees: represented knowledge that one has the ability, executed attentional control, and cognitive control. During mind-wandering the ability is kept and its representation in the self-model, the “epistemic agent model”, is lost, and an ability is exercised only when so represented. The return of control is represented as self-caused even when an unconscious event caused it, a “functionally adequate form of self-deception”. The quantitative argument and the two-thirds figure repeat the 2013 paper’s. | Active — read in full 2026-11-01 (NOTE-1497), from the author’s copy on his Mainz university pages (blogs.uni-mainz.de/fb05philosophie/files/2013/04/Metzinger_M-Autonomy_JCS_2015.pdf, linked from thomasmetzinger.com), typeset with the journal’s running heads and pagination, text extracted with pdftotext. Worth reading for the sharpest statement of the will-organization question in Metzinger: what mind-wandering loses is “not the ability itself” but the conscious knowledge of it, and “one can only deliberately and autonomously exert an ability if that ability is explicitly represented in one’s phenomenal self-model” (THEORY-1300). It also argues that the return of control is represented as self-caused even when an unconscious event caused it (THEORY-1298). A development of LIT-1942 with the empirical detail cut; no new data. |
| LIT-1942 | The myth of cognitive agency: subpersonal thinking as a cyclically recurring loss of mental autonomy | Metzinger (2013). Mind-wandering is a recurring, unnoticed loss of M-autonomy, the ability to control one’s own mental processes, whose defining component is veto: that every ongoing process could be suspended or ended, and that the person knows it. Conscious thought is for the most part subpersonal mental behaviour; it becomes personal-level only when integrated into an “epistemic agent model” (EAM), a transparent self-model of oneself as a knowing, attention-controlling self, which collapses at the onset of each episode. Proposes the “self-representational blink” and a shift in the “unit of identification” to individuate episodes. Its claim that we lack M-autonomy for “roughly two thirds” of conscious life is not borne out by its own minutes, which give about half. | Active — read in full 2026-11-01 (NOTE-1495), from the publisher’s open-access PDF (frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00931/pdf; also PMC3868016), text extracted with pdftotext. Worth reading as the origin of M-autonomy: the ability to control one’s own mental processes, defined by its veto component, and lost without notice in every episode of mind-wandering. It argues that most conscious thought is subpersonal and that a thought becomes the person’s only by integration into an “epistemic agent model”. The “two thirds of conscious lifetime” without M-autonomy is not what its own figures give: they give about half (THEORY-1297). Conceptual work on others’ data; no new data. |
| LIT-1945 | The Problem of Mental Action: Predictive Control without Sensory Sheets | Metzinger (2017), in Philosophy and Predictive Processing. Mental action cannot be active inference through the body, since no sensory sheet is in the loop; it is offered instead as predictive control of effective connectivity aimed at the epistemic value of states in the self-model. Attentional agency controls precision expectations of an internal model. Cognitive agency selects among candidate thoughts that mind-wandering continually generates (“mental sleep-walking”), and M-autonomy lets the system “actively sculpt its own internal affordance landscape”. Whether the conscious epistemic agent model constitutes this control, represents and enables it, or is a phenomenal artefact, current data “do not help to decide”. Agency’s sense of origination may be an enculturated post-hoc confabulation. | Active — read in full 2026-11-01 (NOTE-1496), from the open-access PDF on the collection’s own site (predictive-mind.net/papers/the-problem-of-mental-action/at_download/paperPDF), text extracted with pdftotext. Worth reading for two things the 2013 and 2015 papers lack: a model of mental action as selection from a competition among candidate thoughts that mind-wandering supplies (the “cognitive affordance hypothesis”), and a plain statement that the data cannot yet decide whether the epistemic agent model constitutes mental control, represents and enables it, or is a phenomenal by-product (THEORY-1296). That withholds what M-autonomy (LIT-1941) asserted as a principle. Four testable hypotheses, none tested; no data. |
| LIT-1950 v2 | Irruption Theory: A Novel Conceptualization of the Enactive Account of Motivated Activity | Froese (2023), Entropy 25:748. Proposes Irruption Theory: three axioms (motivations make a difference to behaviour’s material basis; how cannot be measured; behaviour is underdetermined by its material basis) and three theses (irruption, scalability, attunement). Motivation shows only as increased material underdetermination, to be measured as neural entropy; chaos, 1/f noise and criticality are offered to scale it up. Irruptions are undirected: they “can loosen the organization of the current behavior but cannot force the formation of the behavior that is to come”. Effectiveness is credited to attunement, chiefly to self-optimization of a Hopfield network by arbitrary resets plus Hebbian learning. | Active — read in full 2026-11-03 (NOTE-1521), from PubMed Central’s copy of the version of record; worth reading as the founding statement of Irruption Theory, a libertarian enactivist account on which motivation shows only as material underdetermination, and for its own concession that irruptions are undirected and that direction comes from attunement. Conceptual: it has no model or data of its own. |
| LIT-1951 v2 | Keep Your Options Open: An Information-Based Driving Principle for Sensorimotor Systems | Klyubin, Polani and Nehaniv (2008), PLoS ONE 3(12): e4018. Empowerment, the n-step channel capacity from an agent’s actions to its later sensor state, set in an interventional causal-network framework, with contextual empowerment, the capacity given side information, never below the context-free value and bounded by what the agent’s history can tell it. In a cart-pole, a controller greedily maximizing 10-step empowerment balances the pole with no task given, although the most empowered states are unreachable; empowerment as fitness switches a sensor’s layout between niches; and on a Sony AIBO an evolved context automaton comes to track whether a book is present. | Active — read in full 2026-11-03 (NOTE-1514), from the PLoS ONE version of record; worth reading for contextual empowerment, ordered by what the agent can read, and for the cart-pole, where greedy empowerment maximization balances the pole though the most empowered states are unreachable, a case of CLAIM-354’s distinction between reach and what can be sustained. |
| LIT-1963 | Attention as the Source of a Free Will | Jennings (2026), forthcoming in Synthese. Attention is prioritization of mental processing by a subject, and the subject is a collection of fixed, formed and fluid interests with the power to constrain those interests. That power is contextually emergent: the collection’s parts are necessary but not sufficient, and a boundary from its context, the skull, meninges and brain stem, is what lets macro-level patterns constrain micro-level ones. Phase-amplitude coupling is offered as its signature and ephaptic coupling as evidence against weak emergence. Attention breaks stalemates between equally weighted interests and so forms new interests, which the paper offers in place of Kane’s indeterminism as the source of a free will, placing itself “in between libertarianism and compatibilism”. | Active — read in full 2026-11-03 (NOTE-1508), from the manuscript of 2026-10-29 the owner supplied; worth reading as a worked attempt to make attention the mechanism of a will without a homunculus, and for its one original move, a boundary between an emergent phenomenon and its context as what keeps contextual emergence from collapsing into supervenience. Read it knowing that its neural evidence (phase-amplitude coupling, ephaptic coupling) is consistent with the weakly emergent models it rejects, and that its step from a non-reducible subject to free will is asserted. |
| LIT-1965 v2 | Empowerment: A Universal Agent-Centric Measure of Control | Klyubin, Polani and Nehaniv (2005), IEEE CEC 2005, pp. 128–135. Empowerment is defined as the Shannon capacity of an agent’s actuation channel, max over action distributions of I(Aⁿ; S_{t+n}), counted only as far as the agent’s own sensors register it. Knowing the channel’s state can raise it. As a fitness function in a grid world with a signal source it evolves sensors that switch from displacement blobs near the source to bearing arcs far from it, and a wider variety of actuators, with empowerment capped by the sensor’s capacity. | Active — read in full 2026-11-03 (NOTE-1511), from the University of Hertfordshire archive copy; worth reading as the first definition of empowerment, the capacity of the channel from an agent’s actions to its own later sensor, which counts only the control the agent can perceive, a legibility-limited measure of reach for CLAIM-354. |
| LIT-1985 v2 | The Significance of Free Will | Kane (1999), doi:10.1093/0195126564.001.0001. Registered unread from the exchange “Assess SDT Coverage” of 2026-11-02 (A15, A20). Kane’s ultimate responsibility and self-forming actions, and ch. 8’s chaotic amplification of indeterminacy in conflict, which the owner’s U20 links to formal chaos (CLAIM-533). The record held Kane only second-hand (THEORY-316, LIT-1867, NOTE-548). | Unavailable — searched 2026-11-03 for a lawful full text and none was reached, so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. OpenAlex reports it closed; its two other locations are a CiNii catalogue record and a UCLouvain DIAL ebook record (hdl.handle.net/2078/ebook:67558), a licensed library ebook, which timed out; Crossref lists only Oxford Academic, which is subscription access. Web searches found no author copy of the book or of ch. 8. What Kane’s text says about chaos, which CLAIM-533 leans on as “the standard reading”, is therefore still unchecked here. A whole in-copyright book on a file host would not count (ADR-064). It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1990 v3 | Dynamics in Action: Intentional Behavior as a Complex System | Juarrero (1999), doi:10.7551/mitpress/2528.001.0001. Registered unread from the exchange “Assess SDT Coverage” of 2026-11-02 (A21). Intentional action as context-sensitive constraint in a complex system, the nearest philosophical prior art for CLAIM-533 and CLAIM-478’s constraints. | Unavailable — searched 2026-11-03 for a lawful full text and none was reached, so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. OpenAlex reports it closed; Crossref gives no licence; direct.mit.edu returned 403 to this client; web searches found no open-access edition of this book. Juarrero’s later book, Context Changes Everything (MIT Press 2023, doi 10.7551/mitpress/14630.001.0001), is open access and is not this work. Froese 2023 (NOTE-1521) cites this book among the constraint accounts it criticizes. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. Note of 2026-11-03: the 2023 book is now registered and read as its stand-in (LIT-1995, NOTE-1532, Skimmed); it restates this book’s constraint vocabulary and cites it for enabling and second-order context-dependent constraints, but not its action theory. |
| LIT-1994 v2 | Effortless Action: Wu-wei as Conceptual Metaphor and Spiritual Ideal in Early China | Slingerland (2003), doi:10.1093/oso/9780195138993.001.0001. Registered unread from the exchange “Assess SDT Coverage” of 2026-11-02 (reader of U17). Not named by A. The sinological reading against which CLAIM-541’s reading of wu-wei as well-timed small control should be checked (its defeater). | Unavailable — searched 2026-11-03 for a lawful full text and none was reached, so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. OpenAlex reports it closed with no repository copy; Crossref lists only Oxford Academic. A whole in-copyright book on a file host would not count (ADR-064). CLAIM-541’s defeater, a sinological reading of wu-wei, therefore stays untested against this book. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1995 v2 | Context Changes Everything: How Constraints Create Coherence | Juarrero (2023), MIT Press, open access. A speculative natural philosophy (p. 32) of causation by constraint: what raises or lowers barriers to energy flow without transferring kinetic energy (p. 40). Context- independent constraints take conditions away from equiprobability, context-dependent ones away from independence (Gatlin); enabling constraints couple processes into coherent “interactional types” whose constitutive constraints govern their components top down by confining them to a subregion of state space (pp. 67–84). Levels are demarcated by rate discontinuities, wholes are slower, and control is lost when rates converge (ch. 12). Closure of constraints is adopted from Montévil and Mossio (ch. 7); control is analog (ch. 11); delayed-response neuroscience is read as top-down control (ch. 15). | Active — skimmed 2026-11-03 (NOTE-1532): chapters 2, 3, 6, 7, 11, 12, 15 and 16 read in full from the MIT Press open-access PDF, the rest searched by term. Worth reading as the readable statement of Juarrero’s constraint vocabulary (enabling, governing, second-order context-dependent constraints), which the record could not reach in the 1999 book, and for chapter 12’s hierarchy-theory account of rate-demarcated levels, the nearest philosophical prior art for CLAIM-478. Speculative by the author’s account, with no model of its own; its “context-dependent constraint” is Gatlin’s conditional dependence, not TERM-070’s constraint. |