The sense of agency does not evidence regulative control

Libertarians assume that the sense of agency supports their belief in the agent’s ability to have done otherwise; however, they do not present arguments in favor of their assumption beyond introspection. Although agents may hold this belief, the mechanisms that give rise to the sense of agency—the comparator model and the perception of the relation between action and events in the environment—do not provide reasons to support it. Nonetheless, these mechanisms can help explain why agents hold the belief in the first place, and the investigation makes clear that the workings of the mechanisms that give rise to the sense of agency are compatible with determinism. Here, I will defend that a compatibilist explanation can be given as to why the sense of agency may seem to support libertarian beliefs. Hence, the sense of agency does not support the libertarian position in the free will debate; it is merely the pre-reflective experience of action as self-caused, and it is associated with control mechanisms.Keywords: Sense of agency, Regulative control, Incompatibilism, Comparator model, Guidance control.

Cellular self-organizing systems: A field-based behavior regulation approach

Multiagent systems have been considered as a potential solution for developing adaptive systems. In this research, a cellular self-organizing (CSO) approach is proposed for developing such multiagent adaptive systems. The design of CSO systems however is difficult because the global effect emerges from local actions and interactions that are often hard to specify and control. In order to achieve high-level flexible and robustness of CSO systems and retain the capability of specifying desired global effects, we propose a field-based regulative control mechanism, called field-based behavior regulation (FBR). FBR is a real-time, dynamical, distributed mechanism that regulates the emergence process for CSO systems to self-organize and self-reconfigure in complex operation environments. FBR characterizes the task environment in terms of “fields” and extends the system flexibility and robustness without imposing global control over local cells or agents. This paper describes the model of CSO systems and FBR, and demonstrates their effectiveness through simulation-based case studies.

Is regulative control a necessary condition for moral responsibility?

Libertarianist concept of free will is based on the principle of alternate possibilities - standpoint which presupposes that an agent has moral responsibility only if, in the given circumstances, he could have done otherwise. The author of this paper tries to review this key principle of libertarianism, and to determine whether the access to alternate possibilities represents necessary or sufficient cause for the assessment of moral responsibility, or neither of that. Finally, based on the consideration of famous Frankfurt?s and Austin-style examples, in this paper is defended a sort of compatibilism, and the main advantages of that kind of free will concept over libertarianism are emphasized.

Robust Temperature Stabilization for Fluid Catalytic Cracking Units Using Extended Kalman-Type Estimators

Fluidised-bed Catalytic Cracking (FCC) units, are one of the most complex and interactive processes in the refining industry, hence they are difficult to operate and to control; on the other hand they are one of the main producers of gasoline, which is an incentive to improve operation policies. This work deals with the design of regulative control law for stabilisation of reactor and regenerator temperatures considering that kinetics terms are poorly known, which is the industrial case. This control law uses on-line estimates of the heat of reaction, obtained from Kalman-like filtering of measured temperatures. The controllers designed are similar to standard input-output linearising controllers and can be tuned by standard techniques. Performance of the estimation technique under closed-loop operation is analysed by numerical simulations, considering noisy measurements and time delay in the regenerator control input.