2018 Agency in the Physical World
The Agency in the Physical World program is part of a science strategic partnership between the Fetzer Franklin Fund of the John E. Fetzer Memorial Trust and FQXi. This partnership funds work on Agency, Intelligence, and Consciousness.
The PIs listed were selected by a grant review panel and then recommended for funding through a donor-advised fund at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation.
Awardee   |
Institution | Value  |
Project Title |
| Giovanni Amelino-Camelia / Philip Hoehn | University of Naples Federico II / IQOQI | $51,175 | Agency-dependent spacetime and spacetime-dependent agency |
| Paula Apsell | WGBH Educational Foundation | $50,000 | NOVA's What the Physics?! |
| John Barrow | University of Cambridge | $50,000 | The Mathematics of Agency in the Physical World |
| Caslav Brukner | Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI) | $105,289 | Agents in superpositions: the covariance of physical laws in quantum reference frames |
| Sean Carroll | California Institute of Technology | $60,203 | Why Agents Remember the Past and Affect the Future: The Past Hypothesis and the Emergence of Causality |
| Eric Cavalcanti | Griffith University | $50,480 | Causal reasoning in quantum agents |
| Paul Davies | Arizona State University | $113,747 | De Sitter Demons |
| Sebastian Deffner | University of Maryland Baltimore County | $111,282 | Thermodynamics of information from driven quantum field theories |
| Thomas Elliott / Mile Gu | Nanyang Technological University | $70,668 | The role of quantum effects in simplifying adaptive agents |
| Lucien Hardy | Perimeter Institute | $42,504 | Operationalism, Agency, and Quantum Gravity |
| Patrick Hayden | Stanford University | $83,984 | Agency, Simulation, and Counterfactual Computation |
| Matthew Hoban / Ana Belen Sainz | Goldsmiths, University of London / Perimeter Institute of Theoretical Physics | $87,105 | The Emergence of Agents from Causal Order |
| Peter Love | Tufts University | $119,942 | Quantum and classical Bayesian agents |
| Matilde Marcolli | California Institute of Technology | $10,000 | FQXi Agency in the Physical World: Towards a Topological Model of Consciousness and Agency |
| Chiara Marletto / Vlatko Vedral | Oxford University | $104,934 | Agent-based irreversibility in quantum theory: theory and experiment |
| Gerard Milburn | The University of Queensland | $89,774 | Are Quantum agents possible? |
| Kavan Modi / Naotsugu Tsuchiya / Jakob Hohwy | Monash University | $10,000 | Emergent agency from collective dynamics |
| Markus Mueller / Andrew Garner | IQOQI | $69,544 | Where agents and algorithms meet: free will and computational irreducibility |
| Robert Phillips | California Institute of Technology | $120,000 | Agency in Living Matter: The Physics of “Molecular Vitalism” |
| Dean Rickles | University of Sydney | $91,369 | Radical Conservative: A Biography of John Archibald Wheeler |
| Carlo Rovelli | Samy Maroun Center for Space Time and the Quantum | $180,000 | Agency in time-reversal symmetric microphysics |
| Aephraim Steinberg | University of Toronto | $138,000 | Quantum and classical agents and their ability to clone and erase information |
| Susanne Still | University of Hawaii at Manoa | $115,000 | Thermodynamics of Agency |
| Wojciech Zurek | Theiss Research | $75,000 | Quantum Darwinism and Agents |
| TOTAL | $2,000,000 |
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