The architecture of Responsible Autonomy in biological and artificial systems: the Distributed Adaptive Control of volition and agency

Abstract This paper proposes the Distributed Adaptive Control theory of volition and agency (DACva), which parses biological and artificial free will into six capacities that close the agency gap between a reflex and an act: active decoupling, endogenous drive, leeway, normative self-governance, diachronic integrity and experiential ownership. Together they constitute Responsible Autonomy. The DACva architecture spans five layers, somatic to reflective, coordinated by a decoupled model-predictive controller, the compression–expansion–selection–projection (CESP) cascade. It constructs, rather than presupposes, the causal models counterfactual control requires, under the evolutionary pressure of survival in social worlds pervaded by hidden intentional states. The computational principles and neurobiological substrate of DACva are specified in a 12-equation formalism, with an assay and a refutation condition for each capacity. The formalism closes on one equation, the CESP cascade, and yields an explicit definition of freedom: the degree to which an act is the committed trajectory of the agent's own cascade, read on six conditions, one per capacity. From this follows the Evaluation Suite for Responsible Autonomy (ESRA), a perturbational test of architectural competence rather than mimicry, proposed to replace the imitation game; ESRA-S assesses the safety constraints a deployer of AI must impose. DACva argues that the architecture of Responsible Autonomy is the architecture of mind. This article is part of the discussion meeting issue ‘From being to identity: analysis and synthesis of the self’.