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QUESTION-260: Under what conditions is an organizational perspective constitutive of an agent's practical organization, rather than one of the perspectives that influence the agent, and can a perspective be agentic in its own right under the record's competing criteria of agency?

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Properties4
StatusOpen
Tagsagency, individuation
Linedistributed-agency
RefinesQUESTION-093 — Which of predictive autonomy, interventional autonomy, organizational closure and self-individuation must a coalition of processes have before it is a higher-level agent and not a convenient aggregate, and, beyond an effective-information advantage without closure or self-individuation, which of them can it have without the others?

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Why it is a question

A38: “What makes an organizational perspective the perspective of an agent, rather than merely a perspective that influences the agent? A martial tradition influences a fighter. But it is not necessarily an agent itself. A political culture influences a government. But it is not identical to the government. A professional perspective influences an engineer. But the engineer can contest, revise, and sometimes refuse to enact it.” A39 proposed the record’s wording: “Under what conditions is an organizational perspective constitutive of an agent’s practical organization, rather than merely one of the perspectives influencing that agent? Can an organizational perspective be independently agentic, and how would competing criteria of agency classify such cases?”

CLAIM-418 holds that a perspective is not thereby an agent and that the boundaries need not coincide. It does not say where a perspective belongs to an agent. Two things keep this open:

  • The record has two criteria of agency. TERM-044 (Active) and TERM-063 (Proposed) need not classify the same systems, and A39 advised against settling them here. An answer has to say how each classifies a tradition, an interaction and an institution’s operative perspective.
  • A38’s other half is unsettled. Whether “Every sufficiently rich exercise of agency involves an organization of practical significance” depends on how broadly significance is read. On the enactive reading (TERM-063), “Agency and significance emerge together.”

It refines QUESTION-093, which asks which of predictive autonomy, interventional autonomy, organizational closure and self-individuation a coalition must have to be an agent. This asks it of perspectives, and adds the converse: when a perspective is part of an agent and not beside it. A38 suggested where the answer may lie: “a self-governing agent isn’t an entity that possesses one privileged perspective, but an organization capable of exercising and sometimes changing its agency across a plurality of perspectives”. That is CLAIM-424’s capacity, offered as a criterion, and not yet argued.

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