nucleation

THEORY-1119: Barandiaran, Di Paolo and Rohde propose that minimal agency requires individuality, interactional asymmetry and normativity set by the system's own organisation, each necessary and together, they say, sufficient; that individuality without the other two is not agency; and that a system optimizing an externally fixed function is not a model of agency

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Properties5
StatusActive
Tagsagency, individuation, philosophy-of-biology, embodied-cognition
SourceLIT-566 — Defining Agency: Individuality, Normativity, Asymmetry, and Spatio-temporality in Action
ExtendsTHEORY-071 — Minimal agency requires individuality, interactional asymmetry and self-generated normativity, and individuality without the other two is not agency
Cited as “grounds” byCLAIM-194 — A gap or coupling criterion cannot tell a boundary a system produces from one imposed on it: a membrane the cell makes and a beam joining two pendulums pass alike, so the block test cannot by itself supply the individuality minimal agency needs, CLAIM-284 — A self, in the self-governing sense, is a historically continuous organization of processes that takes part in governing the conditions of its own persistence, differentiation and transformation, not merely one that persists, CLAIM-288 — In a population whose operators each maximize an objective the modeller fixed, the norms the organization appears to maintain are set by the modeller, not by the organization: they can become its goals through their role in selecting what persists, but it does not produce or revise them, CLAIM-532 — Self-formation, in the sense the record holds (the transformation dimension of a will-organization), is the production by an agent's own activity on a discrepancy it cannot yet resolve of a maintained capacity, a new distinction it can make legible or a new channel by which it can act, that outlasts the discrepancy and serves a class of later ones; it is told apart from learning an action by transfer to discrepancies of the same class after the inducing conditions are gone, and from a capacity installed or upheld from outside by interventions on the processes that produce and maintain it

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Source

Barandiaran, Di Paolo & Rohde (2009), LIT-566, read in full in NOTE-458: §2 (the three conditions), Table 1 (the cases), §4 (the generative definition), footnote 3 (emergent regulation), §6 (the consequences for models).

The proposal

Three conditions. Individuality: the system distinguishes itself from its environment, and an observer does not do it for the system. Interactional asymmetry: the system is the source of modulations of its coupling with the environment, defined as the system changing a subset of the constraints on an otherwise symmetrical coupling (Eqs. 1–3), not as being the bigger energy source or the stronger statistical influence. Normativity: the coupling is regulated against a condition that can fail and that the system’s own organisation sets.

Each is proposed as necessary. Individuality is the precondition of the other two and does not suffice: in Table 1 a cell in passive osmosis, a kitten warmed by its mother and a person with a Parkinsonian tremor are individuals, and none is acting; a bacterium in metabolism-dependent chemotaxis meets all three and acts. Sufficiency is claimed more weakly: the authors “find it very difficult to conceive of any system that jointly fulfills these three criteria and it is not an agent”.

The generative definition: a system is an agent for a coupling with an environment iff it is an open autonomous system and modulates that coupling adaptively, so as to maintain some of its own processes (§4). Footnote 3 requires the modulation to be emergent: subsystems that regulate to a fixed norm independent of the agent’s state “act as external constraints on the system”. Consequence (b) of §6: systems “that only satisfy constraints or norms imposed from outside (e.g. optimization according to an externally fixed function) should not be treated as models of agency”.

These are the conditions CLAIM-284 uses as tests, the line CLAIM-194 says a coupling criterion cannot draw, and the derivation CLAIM-288 cites.

What this does not say

It does not say the proposal is true. The paper argues from cases chosen to fit the conditions, and its authors call the asymmetry criterion incomplete: what counts as a parametric modulation and what as a coupling between variables “is often a matter of choice for the modeler”. No explicit model has been put through the procedure. That test is THEORY-071’s promote_when, and THEORY-071 stays Proposed until the record holds it. Its “autonomy” and “self” are organisational, not a subject or self-governance.

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