agency: it's only human

our sense of agency is a story our brain tells us about our experience. When the story the brain tells us is that we do not have the power to perform the actions necessary to influence our circumstances for the better, we feel disheartened and lose our motivation; when the story tells us we do have the capacity to act on our desires, we feel empowe

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Another key fact is that agency isn't intrinsic to a system, but rather something we ascribe to it. It's a way of describing a system at the level of abstraction that includes goals, obstacles, motivations, etc. If you look too closely (at a sufficiently low level of abstraction), the agency might seem to disappear. A plant, for example, is 'merely

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