Defining Agency: Individuality, Normativity, Asymmetry, and Spatio-temporality in Action

Abstract

| The concept of agency is of crucial importance in cognitive science and artificial intelligence, and it is often used as an intuitive and rather uncontroversial term, in contrast to more abstract and theoretically heavy-weighted terms like "intentionality", "rationality" or "mind". However, most of the available definitions of agency are either too loose or unspecific to allow for a progressive scientific program. They implicitly and unproblematically assume the features that characterize agents, thus obscuring the full potential and challenge of modeling agency. We identify three conditions that a system must meet in order to be considered as a genuine agent: a) a system must define its own individuality, b) it must be the active source of activity in its environment (interactional asymmetry) and c) it must regulate this activity in relation to certain norms (normativity). We find that even minimal forms of proto-cellular systems can already provide a paradigmatic example of genuine agency. By abstracting away some specific details of minimal models of living agency we define the kind of organization that is capable to meet the required conditions for agency (which is not restricted to living organisms). On this basis, we define agency as an autonomous organization that adaptively regulates its coupling with its environment and contributes to sustaining itself as a consequence. We find that spatiality and temporality are the two fundamental domains in which agency spans at different scales. We conclude by giving an outlook to the road that lies ahead in the pursuit to understand, model and synthesis agents.KEYWORDS | Agency, individuality, interactional asymmetry, normativity, spatiality, temporality. AGENCY AS A DEPARTURE POINThe concept of agency plays a central role in contemporary cognitive science as a conceptual currency across different sub-disciplines (specially in embodied, situated and dynamical approaches- Brooks 1991, Beer 1995, Pfeifer & Scheier 1999. It owes this central role to its capacity to capture the notion of a behaving system while avoiding the endless discussions around alternative foundational terms such as "repres- entations", "intentions", "cognitive subject", "conscious being" or "mind". While an insect-like robot already seems to be a minimal instance of agency, the concept is open enough to also cover humans or even collective organizations. From the departure point of agency it is possible to envision a research program that proceeds from the bottom up, from the simplest embodied behavior, grounding higher level phenomena on increasingly complex forms of situated interactions and their underlying mechanisms. This program would be, furthermore, amenable to dynamical systems' modeling cutting across brain, body and world and integrating different levels of mechanistic organization into the same explanatory framework. This possibility has generated considerable enthusiasm and has come to renew some of the foundations of cognitive science (Beer 1995, Hendriks-Jansen 1996, Ch...

La vida es preciosa por ser precaria: individualidad, mortalidad y el significado

“…La ventaja principal de la teoría autopoiética es que permite a cualquier sistema vivo -siempre y cuando distingamos sus fronteras apropiadamente-aparecer ante nosotros como autónomo, es decir, espontáneamente autodistinguible. Este es el primer paso hacia una teoría flexible y operacional de la agencia individual, que además incluye una regulación asimétrica del acoplamiento autónomo del sistema al entorno, de acuerdo con su propia normatividad (Barandiaran, Di Paolo y Rohde, 2009). Al iniciar con semejante definición de agencia, basada en el concepto de una precaria red autoproductiva de procesos, el comportamiento emergente del sistema es una expresión de su autorrealización metabólica puesta en marcha y se encuentra, por lo tanto, intrínsecamente relacionada para satisfacer las necesidades que permitan al individuo mantener su manera de vivir (Froese, Virgo, y Ikegami, 2014).…”

Norm-Establishing and Norm-Following in Autonomous Agency

“…The issue of biological agency and natural norms is attracting increasing attention (Frankfurt, 1978;Burge, 2009;Di Paolo, 2005;Skewes and Hooker, 2009;Barandiaran et al, 2009;Silberstein and Chemero, 2011;Rietveld, 2008;Kauffman, 2000Kauffman, , 2003Enoch, 2006) and Artificial Life is very well suited to make some conceptual progress on key aspects of agency and its origins. In fact, minimal models of agency have been a recurring topic in the field, from protocellular models to robotics-see Barandiaran et al (2009) for references.…”

“…In fact, minimal models of agency have been a recurring topic in the field, from protocellular models to robotics-see Barandiaran et al (2009) for references.…”

“…In a recent paper, Barandiaran et al (2009) described normativity as one of the essential features of an agent which is defined as: "an autonomous organization capable of adaptively regulating its coupling with the environment according to the norms established by its own viability conditions." (Barandiaran et al, 2009, p. 376).…”

Specific and Complete Local Integration of Patterns in Bayesian Networks

“…Agents are examples of entities fulfilling further properties e.g., exhibition of actions, and goal-directedness (cf. e.g., [5]). Using the formalism of reinforcement learning Legg and Hutter [6] proposes a definition of intelligence.…”