The biological research putting purpose back into life | Aeon Essays

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

basic ingredients for systems that could devise and improvise solutions to living that are emergent, versatile, adaptive, and robust. The new picture dispels the long-standing idea that living systems must be regarded as machines.