Situated Agents, Volitions, and Revelations

Wayne Iba

Westmont College

Keywords: Agents, Agency, Volition, Scientific Method, Revelation, Epistemology

This project addresses the nature of the popular “agent” metaphor in Artificial Intelligence, reviewing the key characteristics of situated agents, environments, sensory and effector interfaces, and learning and performance. After laying out a view of simulated environments and software agents, I will then review philosophical issues and concepts such as agency and epistemology. Perhaps, I will also include a summmary of how the scientific method relates to this view of situated agents and simulated environments. Overall, we want to utilize the software agent situated in a simulated environment as a model of human existence.

With this as background, the questions we want to explore include what we can learn about human knowledge of our world (epistemology), human agency (free will), and about revelation (faith). For human knowledge, we consider knowledge hard-wired in the agent architecture and contrast that to knowledge that can be acquired through experience and introspection. In the case of human agency, we want to explore goals and drives of the agent that influence or determine behavior and consider a view of determinism in this context. And third, we want to consider what revelation might mean to the situated agent, how it could operate and how agents could distinguish between and deliberate about revelatory and empirical knowledge.