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
... See moremeltingasphalt.com • Neurons Gone Wild
The power of agency is, in practice, the power to build: to direct our intelligence toward the work of understanding the world and adapting it to our needs. It’s how we impose a purposeful order on nature’s chaos.
Gena Gorlin • Death is the default
By promoting self-organization, energy flux gradually converts a clump of mindless molecules into information-processing machinery with agency—meaning the self-drive and purposeful action that we associate with life.
Bobby Azarian • The Romance of Reality: How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic Complexity
In ordinary language, we frequently speak of machinery or ideas ‘doing’ things in our lives. But they do nothing. People – human persons – produce, operate and apply their creations. The problem with assigning agency, even informally, to the nonhuman is that this disguises the strength of human control, limited though it is in other respects. It le... See more
Bennett Gilbert • On hope, philosophical personalism and Martin Luther King Jr | Aeon Essays
The Romance of Reality: How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic Complexity
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The Possibility of Life: Science, Imagination, and Our Quest for Kinship in the Cosmos
Jaime Green • 1 highlight
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