Can free agency be compatible with determinism? Compatibilists argue that the answer is yes, and it has been suggested that the computer science principle of "computational irreducibility" sheds light on this compatibility. It implies that there cannot in general be shortcuts to predict the behavior of agents, explaining why deterministic agents often appear to act freely. In this paper, we introduce a variant of computational irreducibility that intends to capture more accurately aspects of actual (as opposed to apparent) free agency: computational sourcehood, i.e. the phenomenon that the successful prediction of a process' behavior must typically involve an almost-exact representation of the relevant features of that process, regardless of the time it takes to arrive at the prediction. We argue that this can be understood as saying that the process itself is the source of its actions, and we conjecture that many computational processes have this property. The main contribution of this paper is technical: we analyze whether and how a sensible formal definition of computational sourcehood is possible. While we do not answer the question completely, we show how it is related to finding a particular simulation preorder on Turing machines, we uncover concrete stumbling blocks towards constructing such a definition, and demonstrate that structure-preserving (as opposed to merely simple or efficient) functions between levels of simulation play a crucial role.

翻译：自由意志能否与决定论相容？相容论者认为答案是肯定的，并有人提出计算机科学中的“计算不可约性”原理有助于阐明这一相容性。该原理表明，通常不存在预测智能体行为的捷径，从而解释了为何决定论智能体往往表现出看似自由的行为。本文引入了一种计算不可约性的变体，旨在更精确地捕捉实际（而非表面）自由意志的方面：计算源头，即成功预测一个过程的行为通常必须包含对该过程相关特征的近乎精确表示，无论得出预测所需时间长短。我们认为这可以理解为过程本身是其行动的源头，并推测许多计算过程具有这一特性。本文的主要贡献在于技术层面：我们分析了是否可能以及如何对计算源头进行合理的正式定义。尽管未能完全解答这一疑问，但我们展示了这如何与在图灵机上寻找特定模拟预序相关联，揭示了构建此类定义的具体障碍，并论证了模拟层级间保持结构（而非仅是简单或高效）的函数起着关键作用。