Agency
Chapter 1 - Worldview
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Welcome to the Agency page
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Key takeaway
- Agency is the expression of the totality of the capacity to act in the world. Whenever entities enter into causal relationships, they can be said to act on each other and interact with each other, bringing about changes in each other
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Core ideas
All agency is emergent; not all emergence is agency
Agency is a specific form of emergence. It belongs to the category of organisational emergence rather than merely structural emergence, distinguished by the constitution of a self-maintaining individual with intrinsic norms, causal asymmetry, and goal-directedness. The pathway from physics to agency runs through dissipative structures*, autopoiesis**, and the advent of intrinsic normativity.
* Dissipative structures are self-organising, ordered systems that emerge in nonequilibrium conditions, maintaining their complexity by continuously consuming energy and dissipating entropy into their environment. Coined by Ilya Prigogine, these systems (e.g., hurricanes, living organisms, flames) persist only through a constant flow of matter/energy, defying the tendency toward disorder.
* Autopoiesis (from Greek auto- "self" and poiesis "creation") refers to a system capable of reproducing and maintaining itself, primarily defining living organisms. Coined by biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela in the 1970s, it describes systems - like cells - that produce their own components and maintain their own boundaries.
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Downwards causation
Agency is arguably a paradigm case of strong (or at least strong-ish) emergence because it involves genuine downward causation: the emergent organisational level causally constrains lower-level dynamics in ways that cannot be explained by those lower-level dynamics alone. Consider, a whispered word (carrying ~10⁻⁹ joules of acoustic energy) can set millions of bodies in motion. The same displacement by physical pushing would require roughly 10¹⁵ joules. This ~24-orders-of-magnitude gap is not explainable at the level of acoustic physics alone. It requires the level of meaning, reasons, and goals - the organisational level of agency. The agent's organisation functions as a selector and amplifier of micro-level fluctuations,channeling stochastic physical processes into directed, norm-governed behaviour. George Ellis has described this as the brain controlling its atoms rather than the atoms simply controlling the brain.
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Agency differs from autonomy
Autonomy focuses on the source of one's behaviour and describes an agent's degree to which it can make decisions and take steps without external influence or control.
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Agency goes further, and is not a partial but an overarching view
- At the action dimension, agency emphasises the power to act and bring about change
- At the evaluation dimension, agency inherently involves a social and structural context; agency is always functioning within a framework of social relations that both enables and limits actions. An agent interacts with a world filled with others, which adds a relational aspect to the concept
- At the potention dimension, agency refers to the ability to act intentionally and effectively in the world
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Collectives can have agency
Treating collective groups such as countries and workplaces the same as individuals is important not just for game theory but for our view of moral responsibility, according to Nobel Laureate Robert Aumann. Collectives should, in fact, be seen as individual entities with their own will. For example, a school of fish moves to escape its attacker. This symbolises the idea that a collective is like an individual. The important point is that it raises possible – and Professor Aumann stressed the word “possible” – moral implications. On one level, it allows us to make more judgments on collectives rather than their members. He raises the idea that there is a greater responsibility on collectives. Be aware. This does not mean that when there is a responsibility at a higher level, the individual at that level is personally responsible. The core point is that collectives can have agency and act upon it.
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