VFWA2026: Varieties of free will and agency University of Sussex Falmer, UK, July 1-2, 2026 |
| Conference website | https://freewillandagency.wordpress.com/ |
| Submission link | https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=vfwa2026 |
| Abstract registration deadline | March 15, 2026 |
| Submission deadline | May 15, 2026 |
Part of the 2026 convention of the UK Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour (AISB), 1-2 July at the University of Sussex, UK.
What does it mean to say that a certain class of agents – free-willed agents – have free will? This symposium is a follow-up to last year’s successful AISB symposium on free will.
Is free will an illusion over which – lacking free will – human beings have no control? If free will is real, who has it and what does it mean to have it? Is free will limited to human beings, or do certain other animal species have it? Is it conceivable that a present or future artefact could have it?
What are the properties that mark a given agent as having free will or not? Must a free-willed agent be by some appropriate description intelligent? Must it be conscious? Must it be reflectively self-aware? (Some would ascribe all these properties to present-day chatbots. Do they have free will? If not, what are they lacking?) Is its free will dependent on “the capacity to do otherwise”, as libertarians would have it; or is it rather dependent on proximal locus of control, as Daniel Dennett has suggested?
How much, if at all, does it matter if an agent “really” has free will or not? What is the difference between an agent claiming to have free will and actually having it?
What would it mean for a non-human species or an artefact to be successfully identified as having free will? How would that change its relation to us, and how might that change our understanding of what it means to be human?
This symposium is interested in revisiting traditional perspectives around free will and, more so, exploring fresh perspectives that address these and related questions. It seeks out approaches that can move discussion past the post-Benjamin Libet stalemate, caught between compatibilism, where free will is compatible with (strict) determinism in a mechanistic universe; and hard determinism, where (as with libertarianism, albeit to a different conclusion) free will and determinism are seen as incompatible.
It is interested in libertarian views, where “libertarian” is to be understood as arguing for the capacity to choose otherwise, or to have chosen otherwise, despite previous states of the universe being in all discernible ways the same. Is libertarian free will dependent, as Robert Kane would have it, on quantum indeterminacy, or are there other paths open that avoid relying on what amounts to chance?
It is likewise interested in compatibilist views that, perhaps, see determinism as something less or other than strict determinism: that is to say, a substantive form of soft determinism. If exceptions to strict determinism are to be allowed, what are they? Most compatibilists are also determinists; but what of those compatibilists who are not? Is Dennett such a straightforward determinist as he often presents himself, or is it possible to read in him a more nuanced view?
Finally, the symposium is interested in hard-determinist viewpoints, historically linked back to Pierre-Simon Laplace and nowadays best associated with Ted Honderich. What are the strongest arguments to be made for hard determinism? What are the consequences of holding fast to a hard-determinist view, and what paradoxical or outright contradictory conclusions might be lurking? Why is hard determinism, like libertarianism, a minority view?
We especially welcome submissions that play these positions off one another in the context of present or future AI agents that might, reasonably, be said to possess free will.
Submissions should be in the form of extended abstracts or full papers (with preference to full papers), formatted according to the following template: [MS Word (recent)] [MS Word (older versions)] [LaTeX].
Deadlines
30 Dec: submission opens
15 Mar: submissions close
15 Apr: notification to authors
15 May: camera-ready copies of final abstracts/papers due, along with completed copyright forms
1-2 Jul: 2026 convention of the UK Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour