Agency

This note is about agency but it also relates to the notions of voice, action, cognition, consciousness.

Agent
Voice
Autonomy
Biosemiotics
Meaning
goals
teleonomy: directedness that self-reproducible systems acquire through evolution 1, the study of goal-directed processes 2

Definitions

"Agency is a matter of doing, trying, initiating. Agency is by-me-ness; it is being a source of action and its effects."

Godfrey-Smith, Peter. Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020.

Agency is a dynamical property of a system. Capacities to respond to the conditions:

transduce
configure
respond

Agential systems can maintain their stability in the changing conditions (all life has agency in a sense of resisting entropy).

Cf. Subjectivity

On the close relationship of consciousness and action, see:

Hurley, Susan L. Consciousness in Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.

In Biology

Modern Synthesis describes dynamical properties of populations at the cost of distorting the nature of biological processes that contribute to evolution.

The Agential Perspective represents biological process with greater accuracy but at the cost of generality.

Walsh, Denis M., and Gregory Rupik. ‘The Agential Perspective: Countermapping the Modern Synthesis’. Evolution & Development, 2023, 1–18. https://doi.org/10/gsmzs3.

Much novelty/innovation in evolution is possible without the need to evolve novel genes or cell types.

Sultan, Sonia E., Armin P. Moczek, and Denis Walsh. ‘Bridging the Explanatory Gaps: What Can We Learn from a Biological Agency Perspective?’ BioEssays 44, no. 1 (2022): 2100185. https://doi.org/10/gnj5tf.

In Novel Ecosystems

There is significant deterioration of information webs and information use in the current, rapidly changing world.

Information is a crucial aspect of organims' niches (all life uses information to act and make decisions) so the impact is far-reaching and undermines the functioning of ecosystems.

There is an urgent need to conserve, restore, and rebuilt information webs.

Szymkowiak, Jakub, and Kenneth A. Schmidt. ‘Ecology of Information Enters the Anthropocene’. Oikos 2022, no. 10 (2022): e09677. https://doi.org/10/gsm5w9.

In Design

Some benefits of agential perspective in design:

Better for specifying action. Concrete and actionable in the local circumstances with local stakeholders is more compatible with the practical circumstances of design because the responsibility of designers is often to take concrete, local action now. Thus, the agential perspective might be more actionable than the population-level view.

Opens the possibilities for rapid more-than-human innovation. The ability of agents to adjust in response to the environment in non-genetic ways is also relevant for design because design situations require innovative responses in periods that are much shorter than those typical for innovations achieved via random mutation.

Establishes the possibility for multiple ways to transmit relevant Information. There are many senders/sources and many receivers. What they perceive and how it matters to them differs from who they are and what they do. This opens possibilities for multiple simultaneous design actions.

In Education

“will and ability to positively influence [one’s own] life and the world around them” (OECD, 2019, p. 16; Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. OECD future of education and skills 2030)

References

Sharov, Alexei, and Morten Tønnessen. Semiotic Agency: Science beyond Mechanism. Cham: Springer, 2021.

Sharov, Alexei A. ‘Biology of Translation: The Role of Agents’. In Translation Beyond Translation Studies, edited by Kobus Marais, 63–80. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022.

Footnotes

Corning, Peter A., Stuart A. Kauffman, Denis Noble, James Alan Shapiro, Richard Irwin Vane-Wright, and Addy Pross, eds. Evolution ‘On Purpose’: Teleonomy in Living Systems. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2023.˄
Dresow, Max, and Alan C. Love. ‘Teleonomy: Revisiting a Proposed Conceptual Replacement for Teleology’. Biological Theory 18, no. 2 (2023): 101–13. https://doi.org/10/gsngq5.˄

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