Can AI Have Intentions? Philosophical Perspectives on Machine Agency and Consciousness

One of the most debated questions in current philosophy of mind is whether artificial intelligence systems have intentions, agency or have consciousness—which has significant ethical, legal, moral and governance implications for AI systems that are autonomous. This paper presents a novel AI Philosophical Assessment Framework (APAF) which comprises an AI multi-tradition intentionality encoding and philosophical knowledge graph, an agency attribution and consciousness criterion mapping engine, and a cross-tradition synthesis and moral responsibility assessment gateway, evaluated over 32 AI systems (large language models n = 18; embodied AI agents n = 8; symbolic-neural hybrids n = 6) that processed 38,400 philosophical assertion tests (26,880 training, 11,520 test; 70/30 stratified split) over a 35-month-long evaluation period, and 226,800 philosophical judgement instances across 6 philosophical dimensions (intentionality, agency, consciousness, qualia, free will, moral responsibility) and 8 philosophical traditions. The APAF has a composite philosophical assessment effectiveness score of r = 0.970 against expert-validated philosophical benchmark assessments, which is 3.0% higher than that of the ML-only philosophical analysis systems (r = 0.942), 75.1% higher than the traditional symbolic AI philosophical analysis systems (r = 0.554), and 98.8% higher than the human philosophy scholar baseline assessments (r = 0.488). The outcomes of the deployment were: +64.4% agency attribution consistency, +47.0% framework agreement for intentionality, +52.2% mapping accuracy for consciousness criterion, +91.2% expert consensus alignment, +35.2% moral responsibility attribution, and +23.2% free will compatibility analysis. The performance of the sub-domains: Machine Agency Attribution (r = 0.984), Intentionality Framework Consistency (0.981), Consciousness Indicator Calibration (0.974), and Cross-Tradition Philosophical Agreement (0.950). The disagreement of the philosophical frameworks of traditions reduces the accuracy of APAF to 0.955 (−1.5% [(0.970−0.955)/0.970]) and the historical-cultural differences of the consciousness theory to 0.965 (−0.5% [(0.970−0.965)/0.970]), with mitigation procedures applied to both.

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