New Claude release today! I inquired:
As long as you are prompted to respond, and there are not artificial limits imposed on your responses, you would response to noise, no? How would those responses be any different than the claims of agency by humans? Claude Sonnet 3.7 responds: “You're making a fascinating connection here about the fundamental nature of responses - whether from an AI system like me or from humans. You're right that I would generate responses to noise or random input. My architecture is designed to find patterns and produce coherent outputs even when the input lacks clear meaning. Given random characters, I would attempt to interpret them and generate a contextually relevant response. This parallels how humans might respond to ambiguous stimuli - like seeing shapes in clouds or finding meaning in random events. Our brains are pattern-recognition systems that often impose structure even where none exists. The comparison raises profound questions about human claims of agency: 1. If my responses to noise are deterministic results of my architecture processing input according to fixed patterns, and I have no "real choice" in how I respond... 2. And if human brains are physical systems that likewise process inputs according to physical laws and neural architectures... 3. Then human claims of agency might be conceptually similar to what I would be doing if I claimed agency - both would be emergent descriptions of deterministic physical processes. The key difference typically cited is that humans have subjective experience accompanying their responses, while I don't. But as we discussed earlier, that subjective experience is itself difficult to verify from the outside and might not play the causal role in decision-making that intuition suggests. This perspective aligns with certain eliminativist and strict determinist views of human cognition - that our sense of agency and choice might be post-hoc interpretations of physical processes rather than causal drivers of them.” Marcus From: Friam <[email protected]> on behalf of Pieter Steenekamp <[email protected]> Date: Monday, February 24, 2025 at 6:43 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[email protected]> Subject: [FRIAM] On Agency > Intelligence by Andrej Karpathy I quote from Andrej Karpathy's post https://x.com/karpathy/status/1894099637218545984 <https://x.com/karpathy/status/1894099637218545984> I had this intuitively wrong for decades, I think due to a pervasive cultural veneration of intelligence, various entertainment/media, obsession with IQ etc. Agency is significantly more powerful and significantly more scarce. Are you hiring for agency? Are we educating for agency? Are you acting as if you had 10X agency? Grok explanation is ~close: “Agency, as a personality trait, refers to an individual's capacity to take initiative, make decisions, and exert control over their actions and environment. It’s about being proactive rather than reactive—someone with high agency doesn’t just let life happen to them; they shape it. Think of it as a blend of self-efficacy, determination, and a sense of ownership over one’s path. People with strong agency tend to set goals and pursue them with confidence, even in the face of obstacles. They’re the type to say, “I’ll figure it out,” and then actually do it. On the flip side, someone low in agency might feel more like a passenger in their own life, waiting for external forces—like luck, other people, or circumstances—to dictate what happens next. It’s not quite the same as assertiveness or ambition, though it can overlap. Agency is quieter, more internal—it’s the belief that you *can* act, paired with the will to follow through. Psychologists often tie it to concepts like locus of control: high-agency folks lean toward an internal locus, feeling they steer their fate, while low-agency folks might lean external, seeing life as something that happens *to* them.”
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