1,720,960 research outputs found
AAI-02 - Responsibility Without a Bearer
No full textModern moral and legal theory has long presupposed a structural alignment between action and bearer: if responsibility exists, it belongs to someone. Agency and answerability were assumed to converge in a subject capable of ownership.
This essay argues that the alignment has become unstable.
Across contemporary decision systems—algorithmic, bureaucratic, financial, institutional—outcomes continue to generate normative demands: justification, sanction, legitimacy, reform. Responsibility has not diminished. Yet the decisive moment no longer maps cleanly onto any identifiable agent. No participant fully controls the outcome; no single role plausibly claims authorship without distortion; no institution fully contains the decision process it deploys.
The result is not collective responsibility in the classical sense. Collective responsibility still presupposes a bearer—plural, coordinated, internally responsive to blame. What is emerging instead is structural orphaning: responsibility persists as normative weight, but without a stable locus capable of carrying it.
The essay develops three claims:
1. Contemporary systems generate a moral surplus—normative pressure without a discharge point.
2. Responsibility increasingly attaches to outcomes rather than decisions.
3. Restoring consciousness—human or artificial—does not restore responsibility, because what is missing is not awareness but custody: the recognized capacity to intervene before an action closes.
Responsibility has not disappeared. Its bearer has. The philosophical problem is therefore no longer who is responsible? but where can responsibility still land without fiction
AAA-01 - Why the Hard Problem of Consciousness Still Matters – Even If AI Never Becomes Conscious
No full textThis essay argues that the hard problem of consciousness retains structural significance in the age of advanced AI, even if AI never achieves consciousness. Consciousness functions as a boundary marker for attribution of responsibility and authorship in decision-making. As algorithmic systems increasingly mediate and delegate decisions, the erosion of clear agency attribution creates a moral vacuum that behavioral performance alone cannot resolve. The paper reframes the relevance of the hard problem from epistemic to normative, highlighting implications for accountability in non-conscious technological systems
AAA-06 - Algorithmic Mediation and the End of Intentional Action
No full text**AAA-06 - Algorithmic Mediation and the End of Intentional Action**
For much of modern philosophy, intentional action has been treated as the central structure of agency. Individuals perceive alternatives, deliberate among them, and initiate action through intention. Responsibility, in turn, is anchored to this moment of commitment.
This paper argues that algorithmic mediation is progressively destabilizing that structure. In many contemporary environments—digital platforms, recommender systems, adaptive interfaces, and automated decision infrastructures—the field of action is increasingly assembled before deliberation occurs. Options are ranked, filtered, and sequenced in real time according to predictive models of behavior. Individuals still act within these environments, but their actions unfold within trajectories they did not design and cannot easily observe.
Under these conditions, intention no longer consistently precedes action. Instead, it often emerges retrospectively as an interpretation of actions already set in motion by mediated flows of options and prompts. Decision points dissolve into sequences of micro-interactions, while responsibility becomes difficult to localize within any single moment of choice.
The paper proposes that the most significant transformation produced by algorithmic systems is not the elimination of human agency but its reconfiguration. Agency persists, yet shifts from originating trajectories to confirming or modulating system-generated ones. Humans remain involved in action while the architecture of intention—the gap in which deliberation once formed—gradually contracts.
Understanding this shift clarifies a growing tension in contemporary societies: systems increasingly shape outcomes while normative frameworks continue to attribute responsibility to individual agents. The result is a widening gap between the lived experience of action and the institutional attribution of accountability
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
AAI-03 — The Causal Lateness of Consciousness
No full textThis paper advances a structural reorientation of the long-standing debate on the causal role of consciousness. Rather than asking whether consciousness is causally efficacious or epiphenomenal, AAI-03 introduces a different diagnostic: consciousness may retain explanatory relevance while losing causal primacy. The central claim is that in increasingly system-mediated environments, conscious awareness arrives after the decisive phase of action has already been structured and executed.
The argument proceeds by distinguishing between three layers: (1) pre-conscious system dynamics, where decisions are formed through distributed processes; (2) the point of causal closure, where action becomes effectively irreversible; and (3) conscious registration, where experience organizes, interprets, and narrativizes outcomes. Under this structure, consciousness is not eliminated but displaced—it becomes temporally and functionally downstream of decision-making.
This shift has implications across philosophy of mind, action theory, and moral responsibility. It reframes debates on free will by questioning whether conscious deliberation still occupies a causally operative position. It also challenges standard accounts of agency that presuppose alignment between awareness and control. In environments shaped by automation, optimization, and layered decision systems, the gap between explanation and causation widens, producing what the paper terms causal lateness.
The paper does not argue that consciousness is illusory, nor that it lacks significance. Instead, it proposes that its role has changed: from initiating action to rendering it intelligible after the fact. This distinction opens a new line of inquiry into how agency, responsibility, and normativity should be understood when conscious thought no longer coincides with the moment of decision
AAA-02 - Behavior Is Not Agency: Why Acting Human Is Not the Same as Being Responsible
No full textContemporary debates about artificial intelligence and moral responsibility increasingly rely on a behavioral shortcut: if a system behaves as if it understands, chooses, or intends, it is treated as possessing some form of agency. This paper argues that this shortcut is conceptually mistaken and normatively dangerous.
Historically, behavioral performance functioned as a reliable proxy for agency because actions were anchored to identifiable subjects who could be held accountable. Algorithmic systems break this condition. They generate human-like behavior—fluent language, coherent recommendations, adaptive optimization—without occupying a position of responsibility within social, legal, or moral structures. Their outputs resemble decisions, but are not owned as such.
The paper draws a sharp distinction between behavioral resemblance and normative agency. Agency is not defined by intelligence, competence, or internal sophistication, but by structural exposure to accountability: the capacity to be answerable, sanctioned, and required to justify one’s actions. Algorithmic systems are explicitly designed to act without such exposure.
As decision-making is increasingly mediated by opaque technical systems, responsibility does not disappear but migrates—diffusing across designers, deployers, institutions, and users without settling on any bearer capable of owning outcomes. The result is not shared responsibility, but a growing accountability vacuum in which actions occur everywhere while responsibility can be claimed nowhere.
The paper concludes that focusing on machine consciousness or intelligence obscures the core transformation underway. The central ethical problem of advanced AI is not the emergence of artificial agents, but the expansion of agent-like behavior without agents—behavior that carries real consequences while remaining normatively hollow. Preserving moral and legal order in algorithmically mediated societies therefore requires resisting the collapse of agency into behavior, rather than attempting to humanize machines
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
AAA-04 - The Quiet Transfer of Agency: How Decisions Left Your Hands Without You Noticing
No full textThis paper examines a structural transformation in contemporary decision environments: the migration of agency without the disappearance of action.
In algorithmically mediated systems, individuals continue to click, select, approve, and endorse. The visible surface of choice remains intact. What shifts is not behavior but authorship. Recommendation systems, ranking architectures, predictive interfaces, and automated defaults increasingly shape the field in which options appear meaningful, reachable, and comparable. Decisions are still executed by individuals, yet the architecture of those decisions is assembled elsewhere.
The argument developed here is conceptual rather than technological. Agency is not equivalent to the execution of available options. Agency consists in the capacity to shape, interrupt, or contest the structure within which options arise. When that structure becomes adaptive, opaque, and optimized for scale, authorship thins even as activity intensifies.
This produces a distinctive asymmetry: responsibility remains socially anchored to the individual, while custody over decision formation drifts into system-level processes. The result is not the elimination of agency, but its redistribution without a corresponding redistribution of accountability.
The paper reframes current debates that center on machine consciousness, alignment, or intelligence. The pressing issue is not whether machines feel or understand, but whether decisions flowing through machine-mediated environments still possess a locus at which responsibility can meaningfully settle.
Agency has not vanished. It has become ambient, distributed, and structurally displaced. The question is no longer whether we choose, but where choosing still originates
AAI-01 - Delegation Is Not Distribution
No full textDelegation Is Not Distribution intervenes in a recurring confusion in contemporary debates on agency, responsibility, and collective decision-making. Against the widespread assumption that responsibility can be preserved by spreading decision-making across multiple actors, the essay argues that delegation and distribution are structurally distinct—and that conflating them obscures how agency can disappear even as action continues.
The core claim is that agency requires custody: the capacity to interrupt, veto, or reclaim a decision before it becomes irreversible. Distribution preserves this capacity; delegation quietly removes it. As a result, responsibility does not become collective—it becomes orphaned.
By clarifying this distinction, the essay reframes discussions of human-in-the-loop systems, collective responsibility, and institutional accountability, shifting attention from individual blame to the architecture of decision-making itself
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