Defining Agency

What distinguishes agency in the context of the enactivist model, helping us to comprehend consciousness and its origins? Key differentiators should be evident in living conscious beings but must also be abstract enough to encompass any process involving decision-making and to refer to entities capable of acting based on those decisions. Agency can be succinctly defined as the ability of an entity to enact change in the world, driven by the force of life.

In a more philosophical context, agency is a skill that individuals can develop. Among complex agents like humans, often called moral agents, agency exists on a spectrum. At one end, we find those with limited agency—like prisoners, slaves, and children—while at the other, we have mature adults adept at navigating societal structures, with a few exceptional decision-makers at the farthest reach, possessing the greatest agency.

Agency manifests at various scales, starting from an impulse in a single cell to the coordinated efforts of approximately thirty-seven trillion cells in a human body, working together to achieve larger collective goals. Some individuals contemplate issues affecting vast populations, illustrating the expansive nature of terms like agency, life, consciousness, and intelligence, which need to be relevant at all scales.

Emerging ideas are beginning to clarify the relationship between agency and consciousness. As enactivism is regarded as foundational for agentic behavior in cognitive frameworks, we can explore concepts that align with this perspective.

Self-justification, a critical concept within this context, refers to the ability to act in a way that visibly alters a system involving the actor. For example, when a bacterium moves towards sugar or when a dog pants, self-justification is at play.

1. Self-justification serves as the basis for spontaneous action, where a single cell or a group of cells initiates a change in the environment.
2. Challenges to this view include the risk of attributing consciousness to non-mental entities, the notion that it might be better framed as mere expression, and the considerable effort required for a layperson to grasp it.

Within the self-justification framework, observable behavior grounds consciousness. Conversely, the goal-directed perspective prioritizes the understanding of intelligence's emergence. Spontaneous behaviors can arise in both chaotic systems and stable environments under stress, with neither necessarily requiring life or consciousness in the conventional sense.

If we pursue a singular criterion to distinguish consciousness from non-consciousness, the self-justification hypothesis appears to hold greater weight. Typically, our environment shows considerable predictability, allowing us to anticipate the movement of billiard balls in a game. If the balls could choose their paths independently, the game’s dynamics would drastically change.

A potential synthesis of these views suggests that billiard balls lack self-justification, a quality inherent in living beings. As patterns emerge, goals become apparent, enabling living systems to self-organize for survival and reproduction, while inanimate objects remain inert. At the microscopic level, agency is linked to life's processes, primarily driven by protein actions in response to environmental changes. But can non-living entities exhibit agency?

Care Ethics & Enactivism

Current literature robustly supports the link between care and intelligence, from existentialist thought to the works of Robert Pirsig, Michael Levin, and others. I believe there is no conflict between Worldview Ethics and care ethics, as both can coexist within an enactivist framework. The interplay between care and attention has long intrigued me.

In my work, Formal Dialectics (Daniel, 2023), I argue that observation follows sensation because sensation does not always coincide with attention. However, when these elements align, lasting memories and attachments can form. This grounding arises from an enactive perspective, where agents can develop care for their surroundings. Existing literature supports these ideas, and it is possible that a systematic method for measuring varying levels of consciousness, intelligence, care, and agency could emerge.

According to Levin, care and intelligence are interconnected; an organism's goals shape its cares. The complexity of these goals reflects the organism's intelligence and serves as the foundation for its motives, which may or may not become conscious in more advanced beings.

While the terms agents and organisms may be interchangeable, it is challenging to dissociate consciousness from life and intelligence. This intricate thought process is worthwhile; if we can untangle it successfully, we may establish a foundational cybernetic framework for ethical reasoning, bringing Worldview Ethics closer to fruition.

Care does not require conscious awareness or explicit expression to manifest through an organism’s actions. There appears to be an overlap between this concept and the notion of Gödel-completeness discussed earlier. As we delve deeper into these questions, we will cultivate a richer understanding of contemporary philosophical challenges.

Pleasure & Pain: The Bedrock of Our Lived Experience

Our reality is shaped by our experiences. The complexity of lived experience often transcends verbal expression, making it difficult to convey accurately. Fortunately, most of our interactions with the world do not require verbalization. However, we must comprehend our surroundings to feel at ease with ourselves. Even though our conscious thoughts are internal and inaccessible to others, our environment heavily influences our cognition.

Our surroundings largely dictate our awareness. We can modify our environment through will, but our histories remain unchanged. We can communicate limited aspects of our experiences and enliven our words with music. Despite our efforts to create a universally comprehensible language, we often fall short.

When we encounter unmet desires, we experience pain. While our understanding of pain is incomplete, it is primarily driven by two systems: the dopaminergic circuit in the brain and the nociceptive system throughout the body.

Experiences that don't meet our expectations lead to reward prediction errors in our brains, which are unpleasant. Neurons adjust their firing patterns and metabolic behaviors, resulting in measurable changes pre- and post-experience.

Physical pain, such as that from a scraped knee or a broken wrist, arises from damage to blood vessels, initiating a coagulation cascade and the release of endothelin-1, which disrupts nerve signal transmission, perceived as pain.

In the mental realm, pain is mirrored by neuronal recognition of adverse outcomes, leading to decreased metabolic activity. If no new avenues are available for resource allocation, this downregulation may persist, potentially resulting in conditions like depression. Over time, the system adapts, and depressive symptoms may abate, but the cognitive pain associated with these events has historically been difficult to articulate. Mental pain reflects the malfunction of previously effective circuits, much like physical pain signals damage to somatic circuitry that conveys inconsistent information.

The complexities of pain exceed simplistic categorizations, with many exceptions to neurological norms. Nevertheless, a compelling mechanical-reductive explanation is forming, linking fundamental human experiences to observable phenomena in neuroscience. This alignment has gained traction since the mid-nineteenth century when scientists first experimented with nerve tissue.

Ancient philosophers often discussed pleasure and pain as humanity's two primary motivators. Modern neuroscience suggests that both occur in the brain, and when our models accurately reflect reality, we experience pleasure. Conversely, when circumstances lead us astray, we feel pain—regardless of physical injury.

The concept of a situational model originates from Hermann von Helmholtz, who viewed the brain as a "prediction machine." Psycholinguists apply situational modeling to explain how readers construct mental models of abstract ideas based on ongoing text comprehension. Worldview Ethics posits that consciousness functions similarly, forming a self-model and mapping beliefs into predictive space.

Care is in the Loop of Cognition

Antonio Damasio's Somatic Marker Hypothesis, introduced in his influential work Descartes' Error (1994), revolutionized cognitive neuroscience. The hypothesis posits that emotions are integral to rational thought—after all, we've all experienced days when fatigue hindered our focus in class. Metabolic processes are essential for cognitive functions.

Pursuing the Metabolic Theory of Consciousness outlined in Essay 2 could lead to insights into cognitive computation beyond traditional digital or quantum frameworks. The argument suggests that metabolism underpins agency and language; thus, we must reconsider the applicability of these concepts within a digital computational context.

Levin acknowledges this perspective but aims to abstract the idea of care from metabolic processes to avoid bias against discovering non-traditional life forms capable of cognition or consciousness. This approach is commendable, and the Metabolic Theory of Consciousness can coexist with alternative theories, enriching interdisciplinary discourse.

Attentional Guidance

Attentional guidance is central to conscious thought. It consists of endogenous and exogenous factors that steer our focus.

Distractions may arise from external stimuli, prompting a glance over the shoulder or a screen notification, or from recalling a previously set task, such as a shopping list.

In these instances, our focus on one aspect of lived experience is interrupted, but we can often return to our original task without significant detriment.

Endogenous attentional guidance is typically influenced by the prefrontal cortex, while exogenous guidance relates to the limbic system. A detailed exploration of these concepts will need to be deferred for now.

Taxonomy of Decision Making

A crucial project involves developing a taxonomy of decision-making processes. Decisions encompass numerous variables, and a comprehensive map of influences could yield significant insights into cognitive behavior. The Worldview Ethics book may benefit from some taxonomical analysis, encouraging readers to contribute their experiences or insights.

Ongoing, Complex, Unrepeatable

After exploring the core question, “What are enactive agents?” we can tentatively define them as ongoing, complex, unrepeatable processes utilizing abstract representations and cognitive computation, enabling near-real-time decision-making that results in emergent behaviors in living organisms, either individually or collectively.

This perspective can shift while retaining its essence, as an enactive agent forms part of a complex environment-individual system, enabling goal-directed or self-justified actions within a broader ecological framework. From sufficiently scaled superorganisms composed of smaller units, highly sophisticated environment-individual systems can arise.

At every level, the events within enactive systems are best understood as ongoing processes rather than static occurrences. Additionally, these processes are inherently complex, reflecting sensitive dependencies on initial conditions. Lastly, no two states of an enactive system are identical; while complexity may evolve, the arrow of time is irreversible, preventing the return to any previous state. Even the simplest organisms are subject to environmental change.

References

1. Damasio, A. R. (1994). Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York, NY: G.P. Putnam’s Sons.
2. Daniel, Thomas Dylan. (2023). Formal Dialectics, Serious Philosophy. https://opensea.io/assets/optimism/0xe7f967ed990c4db5262b592a3e5b70e29dd585c3/2
3. Doctor, et. al. (2022). “Biology, Buddhism, and AI: Care as the Driver of Intelligence,” Entropy 2022, 24(5), 710; https://doi.org/10.3390/e24050710
4. Jarow, Oshan. (2022). “Scaling Selfhood,” In Musing Mind. [Audio podcast episode]. Retrieved from

Originally published at https://app.t2.world.