Volition, although often poorly defined, is a concept of interest and utility to both philosophers and researchers in artificial intelligence. In this article, a definition of volition is proposed and a functionally defined, physically grounded ordinal scale and a procedure by which volition might be measured are put forward: a type of Turing test for volition, but motivated by an explicit analysis of the concept being tested and providing results that are graded, rather than Boolean, so that candidate systems may be ranked according to their degree of volitional endowment. It is proposed that volition is a functional, aggregate property of certain physical systems and it is defined as the capacity for adaptive decision-making. The scale, similar in scope to Daniel Dennett's Kinds of Minds scale, is then outlined, as well as a set of progressive “litmus tests” for determining where a candidate system falls on the scale. Such a formulation may be useful for understanding volition and assessing the progress made in engineering intelligent, autonomous artificial organisms.
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