Global Philosophy Research Interest Group Talk (Martin Adam, University of Victoria)

The Global Philosophy Research Interest Group is delighted to welcome as guest speaker Martin Adam, an associate professor in the Department of Pacific and Asian Studies at the University of Victoria. His work is centered on Indian Buddhism and Buddhist Ethics, with more general interests in other south Asian religious traditions and western Philosophy. He received my PhD from McGill University in 2003, having spent extended stays at institutions in India, Nepal, and Switzerland.

Talk Title

Buddhist Phenomenology and the Question of AI Agency

Talk Abstract

Agency is only one among the many attributes of human consciousness whose replication is being actively pursued in the race to develop artificial general intelligence. Work towards its achievement is handicapped by a lack of agreement as to its definition. The present article examines the idea of agency, inquiring in particular about that element of human agency in virtue of which we are sometimes able to say that we act freely. Part of the experience of being a human agent consists in the fact that we sometimes feel free in acting and sometimes feel unfree. Here, our discussion will be trained on the psychological basis of this aspect of our experience of free agency, irrespective of the philosophical question of whether we ever actually are “truly” free in a metaphysical sense. The analysis proceeds with an eye towards assessing the possibility of attributing agency to an artificially created intelligence. Following an ordinary language account of how we tend to speak and think about free agency, I examine what the tradition of Theravāda Buddhist Abhidhamma has to contribute on this topic—finding a number of remarkable parallels. The article concludes with a consideration of whether from an Abhidhammic perspective it might ever make sense to attribute free agency to a created machine intelligence.