Agency

Following the establishment of substrate-agnostic unpredictability in Bee (2026), this paper presents a formal computational model for internal human agency. We argue that "Free Will" is neither a mystical intervention nor a retrospective illusion, but a technical property of Self-Referential Modeling Systems. We propose its replacement with Functional Agency: a technical property of systems that possess an Incomputability Firewall against external reduction. -/- Utilizing the Halting Problem (Turing, 1936) as a formal template for self-reference limits and the Principle of Computational (...) Irreducibility (Wolfram, 2002), we demonstrate a Reflexive Prediction Barrier that prevents any resource-bounded predictor from generating intervention-stable predictions of a complex agent without either equivalent computational cost or a violation of the agent’s deliberative integrity. We further expand the metric of Agency Depth, first introduced in Bee (2026), as a function of Temporal Horizon, Counterfactual Width, and Historical Integration. We define Effective Agency to incorporate Model Fidelity as a calibration multiplier, representing the functional capacity of an agent to act as a Salient Cause. -/- This model proves that sovereignty is not a metaphysical constant but a variable resource subject to environmental and cognitive constraints, providing the rigorous, non-dualistic foundation required for the Meaningfulness Protocol and the systemic defense of human dignity in an age of hyper-resolution predictive modeling. (shrink)

The modern age mistakes optimization for understanding and direction for action. By replacing labor with control, it erases resistance, responsibility, and self-recognition. What survives is not agency, but a managed illusion of it.

Abstract For centuries, the free will debate has been paralyzed by a false binary: either human agents possess metaphysical “uncaused causation” or we are deterministic automata. I argue that free will is not a binary property but a scalar capacity inherent to life itself—the capacity to redirect causal flow toward persistence. This capacity, which I term Hormē (Ὁρμή), is the constitutive drive of living systems and scales through evolutionary complexity: from bacterial taxis to hu- man deliberation. By reframing free will (...) as what life does—not what minds have—I dissolve the traditional stalemate and provide an empirically grounded, testable account of freedom across the tree of life. The framework yields a graduated spectrum of agency—from vegetative (plants) to reflective (human)—each with measurable degrees of causal influence. This approach naturalizes free will without reducing it, offering a unified account that respects both the laws of physics and the lived reality of choice. The result is not just a philosophical solution but a scientifically testable framework with implications for neuroscience, artificial intelligence, mental health, and ethics. -/- Keywords: free will, scalar agency, Hormē, causal flow, degrees of freedom, life‐agency continu- ity, thermodynamics, navigation. (shrink)

This article argues that contemporary accounts of agency mislocate its normative significance by treating it as a standing capacity—typically reason-responsiveness or reflective control—available across normal conditions of action. While such accounts aim to preserve responsibility under determinism, they risk over-ascribing agency and thereby trivialising both freedom and responsibility. I propose an alternative conception of agency as episodic and epistemically conditioned. Most action proceeds under conditions of epistemic alignment, in which inherited norms, roles, and evaluative frameworks render conduct intelligible without requiring (...) authorship in a strong sense. Agency becomes explanatorily salient only when this alignment fails—when epistemic rupture disrupts practical intelligibility and forces agents to take ownership of the normative terms under which action proceeds. By analysing epistemic dissonance as an agentially significant event, the paper shows how agency can ground responsibility without being a continuous feature of action or belief. It further explains how agency may be structurally foreclosed within institutional roles through constitutive failure, even where intention and competence remain intact. Re-locating agency in this way preserves the normative core of responsibility while avoiding both metaphysical inflation and sceptical denial. (shrink)

Contemporary decision-theoretic, planning-theoretic, and control-based accounts of agency explain how agents optimise, plan, and respond to reasons over time. What they do not explain is why there must be a single agent to begin with, rather than a succession of locally rational decision processes. This article diagnoses a shared structural presupposition across these accounts: each assumes a stable evaluative standpoint in which preferences, utilities, commitments, and revisions are already unified across time. I argue that this assumption conceals a prior problem—the (...) frame-stability problem—concerning how any system can remain a coherent locus of evaluation under diachronic uncertainty when the evaluative frame itself is generatively unstable under learning, feedback, and environmental change. Optimisation, planning, and control mechanisms coordinate action only conditional on such stability; they cannot by themselves secure the persistence of evaluative authority. I propose that agency arises as a structural solution to this pressure: a system counts as an agent when it must preserve itself as a unified evaluator across incompatible future trajectories. Unified arbitration is introduced as the architectural role through which evaluative authority is maintained over time. (shrink)

It is uncontroversial that many systems possess knowledge without being conscious: biological subsystems retain information, procedural skills guide action, and artificial systems learn and deploy complex representations. What remains insufficiently explained is why epistemic agency must arise at all, rather than how it is merely attributed once present. This article argues that epistemic agency—the capacity to hold, revise, and act upon knowledge as the same agent across time—presupposes consciousness. Building on the ontological continuity condition, it draws a principled distinction between (...) knowledge that merely informs behaviour and knowledge that must be owned, revised, and answered for under long-horizon uncertainty. Where a system must arbitrate between incompatible action trajectories in order to preserve itself as a persisting agent, consciousness becomes functionally necessary on the present account. Epistemic agency is thus characterised not as a metaphysical power, but as a structural role emerging from unified arbitration under identity risk. The article shows why many adaptive systems, including contemporary artificial intelligences, can instantiate knowledge without qualifying as epistemic agents, and clarifies the structural conditions under which artificial epistemic agency might arise in principle. Consciousness is thereby reframed as a threshold for epistemic responsibility rather than for intelligence or knowledge as such. (shrink)

Advanced artificial agents and large-scale human institutions increasingly face the same structural dilemma: systems optimized for control and stability tend to stagnate, while systems that permit creativity and exploration often destabilize. Existing approaches to alignment, governance, and innovation typically address this tension at the level of behavior, outputs, or policy, but fail to explain how generative capacity can be sustained safely as systems become more autonomous and complex. This paper argues that the problem is not creativity itself, but the absence (...) of a structural ordering that distinguishes purpose, internal stability, and generative pressure. We introduce a unified framework for generativity under constraint, integrating three complementary components: Teleological Alignment (TA), which fixes the long-horizon direction of an intelligent system toward explanation rather than domination; Coherence-Based Alignment (CBA), which preserves internal consistency across beliefs, reasoning, actions, and values under autonomy; and Paradigm Shift Readiness (PSR), a capacity metric measuring a system’s ability to generate paradigm-level novelty through volatility, permeability, risk tolerance, explanatory acceleration, and export power. The central claim is that generativity becomes productive rather than dangerous only when PSR is subordinated to teleological orientation and coherence, and that misordering these elements reliably produces either stagnation or instability. The paper develops this ordering principle, analyzes characteristic failure modes when creativity, coherence, or purpose are improperly sequenced, and anticipates common objections concerning safety, control, and metric gaming. Finally, it proposes an operational evaluation scheme combining teleological orientation, coherence integrity, and paradigm shift readiness to assess both artificial systems and human institutions without relying on output metrics alone. The framework is diagnostic rather than prescriptive, offering a structural account of how systems can remain creative, coherent, and safe as autonomy and scale increase. (shrink)

Recent discourse increasingly describes advanced artificial intelligence systems as ‘agentic’. Planning-capable language models, autonomous workflows, and multi-agent architectures are said to exhibit agency insofar as they pursue goals, initiate actions, and coordinate behaviour over time. This article argues that such characterisations rest on a structural conflation. Drawing on a continuity-based account of agency, it shows that most systems labelled ‘agentic’ lack the conditions under which agency can arise at all. Agency, the article argues, is not a behavioural achievement but a (...) structural response to continuity pressure: the need to preserve a unified locus of evaluative authority across incompatible future trajectories. Optimisation, planning, and coordination presuppose such unity; they do not generate it. Systems that are resettable, substitutable, or governed by externally specified evaluative standards may optimise effectively while lacking authorship of evaluative authority. Applying this criterion to contemporary AI architectures and governance practices, the article concludes that the principal danger lies not in machines becoming agents, but in attributing agency where continuity, authorship, and responsibility are structurally absent. (shrink)

While the long-dominant genocentric framework minimised the role played by organisms, newer approaches emphasise their ‘agency’. Yet, definitions of agency vary across and within disciplines, and this equivocality hinders establishing a cohesive theoretical framework. This paper reviews the literature on agency from philosophy, evolutionary theory, developmental biology, and behavioural ecology, and argues that agency rests on three core capacities: Individuality, Playful flexibility, and Memory (IPM). Differences in their relative expression generate qualitatively distinct forms of agency: autonomous organisation, goal-directed choice, and (...) inventiveness. The IPM model clarifies how these forms relate, offering a unified and operational framework for biological agency. (shrink)

Several philosophers have suggested that certain aspects of people’s experience of agency partly explains why people tend to report that it seems to them, in perceptual experience, as though time robustly passes. In turn, it has been suggested that people come to believe that time robustly passes on the basis of its seeming to them in experience that it does. We argue that what requires explaining is not just that people report that it seems to them as though time robustly (...) passes, and that they believe that it does, but rather, the substantial variation (a) in people’s reports regarding whether it seems as though time robustly passes, and (b) their beliefs about whether time robustly passes. We empirically investigate the agentive explanation of (a), according to which variation in people’s agentive experiences explains variation in people’s reports regarding whether it seems to them as though time robustly passes. We also empirically investigate the experiential seeming explanation of belief, according to which variation in people’s beliefs about whether time robustly passes is explained by variation in their reports regarding whether it seems in experience as though time robustly passes. We found empirical support for the agentive explanation, but not for the experiential seeming explanation. We consider the implications of our results for three views about temporal experience and temporal beliefs: dynamism, passage illusionism and deflationism. (shrink)

Four centuries ago, Descartes introduced "I think, therefore I am," in the Cogito which secured a foundation for the certainty of knowing, but left the structure of agency without an equivalent point of origin. This book argues that such a foundation exists, and that it is revealed in the most elemental feature of lived experience, which is the ability to direct one’s own focus. Before intention or choice, before deliberation or desire, there is the self-evident act of orienting awareness, and (...) from this act emerges a new first principle articulated in the axiom Focō, ergo volō, "I focus therefore I will". This axiom is not a metaphysical posit and it is not an empirical conjecture. It stands in the transcendental register where its truth is demonstrated in the very effort to examine or deny it, for any attempt to assess the claim already performs the act it identifies. The capacity to locate, shift or withhold attention is the primordial gesture through which an agent discloses itself as the source of its own activity. A Defense of Focō, ergo volō establishes the philosophical legitimacy of this axiom and justifies its place as the irreducible ground upon which all accounts of agency must rest. Descartes’ Cogito secured the certainty of the thinking self. This work explicates the originary activity through which that self becomes capable of authorship. In doing so, it brings to completion a structural insight that remained implicit since the first articulation of modern thought. (shrink)

Psychological theory often treats causal explanation as incompatible with responsibility, oscillating between moralism and excusal. This paper applies Resolution Theory (RT) to dissolve that false dichotomy. RT understands agency as resolution: the evaluative closure of competing considerations into action within a conscious field. Causal pressures shape the evaluative field but do not negate authorship; responsibility does not require freedom from causation. -/- The central diagnostic distinction is between distortion and bypass. In most psychologically relevant cases, agency is preserved but distorted: (...) resolution occurs through a narrowed, warped, or overloaded evaluative field. Genuine bypass—where evaluative resolution is absent—is rare, limited to states such as unconsciousness, seizures, or true blackout fugue. Responsibility therefore remains binary, grounded in authorship through resolution, while blame and intervention are properly scalar, tracking the degree and persistence of distortion. -/- This framework is applied to addiction, coercive control, therapeutic practice, educational psychology, and psychosocial environments. Addiction is analysed as distortion without bypass, preserving agency while justifying mitigation. Coercive control is shown to collapse the space of live options without eliminating authorship. Therapeutic change is reconceived as the restoration of evaluative coherence and flexibility rather than the enforcement of willpower or denial of agency. -/- By separating explanation from exemption and mitigation from authorship, Resolution Theory offers psychology a precise and humane account of agency under constraint. (shrink)

This paper offers a phenomenological and developmental investigation into constructive play as a legitimate pathway in the architecture of human becoming. Beginning with first-person reflection on the author's childhood pattern of building scenarios rather than animating narratives—creating airports, cities, and functional systems rather than voicing characters or enacting dramas—the analysis integrates Sara Smilansky's taxonomy of play types with Erik Erikson's psychosocial framework and existentialist attention to authentic self-formation. The paper argues that the developmental literature's privileging of sociodramatic play as "the (...) most mature type of play" obscures the distinct cognitive orientations and developmental contributions of constructive, object-oriented play. Drawing on the Van Gogh Curve framework—which reconceptualizes apparent deficits as specialized excellences—and neurodiversity research demonstrating that "grounded-in-reality" play preferences represent legitimate cognitive specialization rather than failed dramatic competence, the paper reframes the central question from "was my play normal?" to "was my play true to my nature?" This PsyPhi integration—the consilience of psychological empiricism and philosophical reflection—reveals that constructive play serves developmental functions in spatial reasoning, systems thinking, and goal-directed achievement while anticipating adult capacities as architects of possibility. The paper concludes that the scenario-builder who creates structures within which others may find space to become offers not animation but architecture, not stories but the stages on which stories can be told. (shrink)

Abstract: How does purposive agency emerge in a universe of blind physical laws? This paper answers by deriving and defending: T6: The Life‐Agency Isomorphism Theorem: Life and minimal agency are isomorphic. A system is alive if and only if it possesses Hormē (the striving to persist), and it possesses Hormē if and only if it is an agent. I argue that Hormē (Ὁρμή) is not a metaphor but a measurable thermodynamic state: the continuous work performed by a far-from-equilibrium system to (...) maintain its boundaries. This constitutes the capacity to “direct causal flow”—altering the stream of cause and effect to secure persistence. By identifying this shared physical basis, the framework dissolves two persistent philosophical gaps: the Life/Mind Gap, by showing agency is the thermodynamic condition of life; and the Mechanism/Teleology Gap, by demonstrating that purposiveness is the immanent logic of dissipative structures. Finally, I sketch how this agency scales evolutionarily—from bacterial taxis to the human Nous (the meta-cognitive capacity for abstraction and self-modeling)—providing a naturalistic foundation for intrinsic normativity. -/- Keywords: agency, teleonomy, autopoiesis, thermodynamics, Hormē, philosophy of biology, en- activism, dissipative structures, Life-Mind Continuity, Life-Agency Isomorphism, Mechanism- Teleology Gap. (shrink)

Melis and Monsó (2024) have recently argued that non-human animals are capable of reflectively responding to normative reasons. They argue for this via animals’ capacity to respond to undermining epistemic defeaters. Although we are ultimately sympathetic to this idea, the present article develops a principled methodological challenge to the empirical evidence they cite to corroborate their claims. What we call the Acquisition Problem shows that extant empirical studies cannot provide differential support for the hypothesis that animals reflectively respond to reasons. (...) We close by suggesting two possible ways forward that evade our challenge, while remaining true to the spirit of Melis and Monsó’s proposal. First, future studies could aim to model testimony of undermining defeaters in social learning. Second, and even more promisingly, we should focus on the broader phenomenon that Melis and Monsó’s proposal points towards, namely, animals’ responsiveness to higher-order reasons. (shrink)

The sense of agency is the experience of predicting, initiating, or controlling actions. In this paper, I provide a novel account of the sense of agency that appears in perceptual consciousness. I follow theorists such as Bayne and Prinz in suggesting that the perceptual sense of agency (PSoA) is underpinned by self-monitoring processes. The self-monitoring mechanism compares sensory predictions, made on the basis of motor commands, with sensory feedback. This comparison process distinguishes self-caused from other-caused perceptual changes. I argue for (...) a view where the PSoA is not explained by certain contents represented in perceptual experience. Rather, my account models the PSoA as a type of intentional mode that perceivers bear to contents. After defending this view, I respond to objections and contrast my account with others in the literature. (shrink)

In this thesis, I aim to contribute to the reconciliation of two ways of looking at human agency—from the perspective of agents themselves, and from a detached, scientific perspective—by combining resources from the free will literature and the action theory literature. I will show that we can preserve most of our ordinary conception and intuitions about human agency rooted in common sense even if we suppose the truth of determinism and a universal event-causal framework. Below are the two key claims (...) defended in the thesis. (i.) Free Agency (which is required by moral responsibility) is the ability to respond to reasons. (ii.) To exercise free agency is to act for reasons; while acting for reasons can be captured within an event-causal framework. Accordingly, I will defend two theories concerning human agency: one is the reasons-responsiveness theory of free will and moral responsibility; the other is the causal theory of action. The first theory helps to show that free will and moral responsibility can exist in a deterministic world; while the second theory helps to resolve the tension between action and the event-causal framework. Moreover, I will integrate these two theories. This integration aims to provide a more complete picture of human agency. According to this picture, the exercising of human agency can be taken as a continuum—ranging from basic voluntary control to high-level actions which merit moral evaluation; this continuum can be captured within a unified theoretical framework, namely, the event-causal framework. That is, the important features of human agency, from basic purposive actions to free and responsible actions can be explained in terms of event-causations. In doing so, I advance a new account of reasons-responsiveness theory, deflate the problem of causal deviance by developing a novel account of control, and solve the problem of disappearing agency by developing an account of agent’s participation in her action. I will also investigate several kinds of phenomenology of agency which purportedly speak against the event-causal account of action. The integrated theory developed shows us how our agency, in all its complexity, fits into a naturalistic picture of the world. (shrink)

The felling of the Sycamore Gap tree resulted in a passionate public response, which offers a window into public attitudes of care about the natural environment. The response, however, was inconsistent with other recent tree-loss events, in terms of both magnitude and strength of feeling. To better understand this inconsistency and its consequences, an analysis of public responses to the Sycamore Gap event, and other comparative tree-loss events, has been performed. This reveals that the expressions particularly convey moral sentiments concerning (...) the instrumental and aesthetic value of the tree, with little recognition of intrinsic value. Following an environmental care ethics approach, I argue that these responses don’t reflect an authentic care about nature but instead a desire to care about nature. The absence of an appropriate appreciation of the non-anthropocentric identity of nature results in an epistemically-constrained ethical response, reduced individual agency, and thus limited environmental responsiveness. (shrink)

This philosophical treatise offers a practical resolution to the existential problem posed by Albert Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus. While Camus famously concluded that we must imagine Sisyphus happy, he provided no mechanism for achieving this state. This paper argues that the key to Sisyphean happiness lies not in changing the boulder (one's philosophical problems) nor in changing Sisyphus himself (the immutable self), but in systematically developing one's knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs). By reconceptualizing the Sisyphean equation through the (...) lens of self-cultivation, we discover that what appears as an unchangeable burden becomes progressively lighter through the strengthening of one's intellectual and practical capacities. The boulder does not shrink; rather, we grow stronger. This treatise presents a framework for thinking outside the existential box by identifying the single variable within our control and demonstrates how this insight transforms the absurd condition from torment into triumph. The implications extend beyond philosophical contemplation to practical applications in personal development, therapeutic intervention, and educational philosophy. (shrink)

Contemporary discourse on Artificial Intelligence predominantly frames human agency as a psychological attribute or ethical imperative. This paper argues for a structural redefinition grounding freedom in ontology rather than ethics. We establish that human freedom is not a consequence of rationality but its precondition: humans are free (ontologically incomplete), therefore rational. This inverts 2,500 years of Aristotelian tradition. Ontological Indigence—the biological reality of neoteny and the absence of closed instinctive programs—is not the source of freedom but its observable manifestation at (...) the biological level. By distinguishing First Cause (capacity to initiate causal chains not determined by antecedent conditions) from Second Cause (transmission of received determinations), we analyze the specific threat posed by Generative AI. While AI systems simulate creativity, they operate structurally as perfect Second Causes: processing syntax without semantic comprehension or the biological necessity of the "Interval" between stimulus and response. The paper concludes that human freedom is an ontological structure manifested as biological indigence, and that the automation of judgment threatens to erode the cognitive structures required to exercise First Cause, effectively reducing human agents to operators of statistical probability. (shrink)

This essay offers an internal ontological analysis of the New Testament’s anthropology. It argues that the New Testament does not aim at the preservation or fulfillment of personal autonomy, but at the elimination of the subject as an independent center of will and decision. By examining key scriptural formulas and their systematic articulation in classical Christian theology, the essay shows that truth is defined as coincidence with a single source, while autonomy and individuation are treated as defects of a fallen (...) state. On this basis, Christian personalism is interpreted not as a genuine alternative, but as a rhetorical mitigation of an anti-subjective ontology. The final section contrasts this framework with a strict notion of personalism understood as irreducible selfhood and argues that the two positions are structurally incompatible. (shrink)

In this text, I aim to link Sellars’s view on intention with a fundamental Hartian insight: that a normative domain cannot be fully understood without considering the perspective of its participants. Following this insight, I delve into how the communal aspects of our intentions can make room for a legal point of view that is distinct from the moral one, thereby opening the door to a defence of the fragmentation thesis. To this end, I first outline some basic issues regarding (...) the connection between intention and practical reason (section II). I then present some ideas about the structure and logic of intentions (section III) in order to advance to a theory of we-intentions that explains the point of view of moral agents (section IV). Finally, following the Kantian spirit of Sellars’s project, I apply this schema to legal agency and indicate the consequences for the discussion addressed in this book (section V). (shrink)

Moral philosophy often assumes that ethical responsibility is continuous across time. Yet, patterns in generosity, care, and reconciliation suggest that moral attention is socially and institutionally scheduled, concentrated into ritualised windows such as holidays, awareness months, and fiscal-year campaigns. I introduce the concept of the moral docket — a calendar-based queueing of moral obligations — and show how it produces December selves: temporally bounded moral identities activated during sanctioned periods of care. This system, which I term scheduled humanity, stabilises institutional (...) legitimacy, absorbs social guilt, and shapes the distribution of moral labour, while simultaneously eroding capacities for continuous ethical responsiveness. By highlighting how temporal governance reshapes moral subjects, this essay argues that scheduled compassion substitutes for continuous justice, producing populations habituated to intermittent moral engagement and deskilled in everyday ethical responsibility. (shrink)

This dissertation investigates the nature of reason-possession, a topic that has received significant attention in recent philosophical literature. Existing discussions often center on a key puzzle: How can false beliefs appear to provide agents with reasons to act, making them rationally responsible for forming intentions based on these beliefs? This puzzle highlights a potential tension between the objective sense of reasons, understood as facts tied to the rational advisability of actions, and the subjective sense of reasons, grounded in an agent's (...) rational criticizability. I offer a solution to this puzzle by introducing the Multifactorial Account (MA) of having normative practical reasons, developed through critiques of the extant Factoring Account and Two Relations Account. MA describes reason-possession as a state of mind where a person comes under a requirement of rationality—what I call the Practical Entailment Requirement (PER). Unlike the Instrumental Requirement, which has been traditionally invoked to explain normative conditions in instrumental reasoning, PER provides a comprehensive framework for understanding how attitudes generate rational options and determine the reasons agents have in practical reasoning. I argue that coming under an instance of PER explains why propositions— whether true or false—like <the glass is full of gin-and-tonic> or <I will drink gin-and-tonic>, can serve as an agent’s reasons when the agent is in a position to justifiably believe or intend to make them true. Ultimately, this dissertation aims to advance a deeper understanding of the relationship between practical reasoning and rational responsibility. Reason-possession, I contend, must be understood as integral to episodes of practical reasoning, shaped by a person’s attitudes and the normative demands of rationality. (shrink)

At first glance, the type of effort required to solve a chess puzzle and run a marathon seems fundamentally different. I argue they’re not. I present a novel account of effort in which all effort is explained through the lens of a domain-general psychological mechanism, cognitive control. I outline how effort choice and execution take place, emphasizing the role of cognitive control, a mental process by which all effort—mental and bodily— is made. I present four arguments that convergently provide strong (...) support for the cognitive control account. Additionally, I examine the implications of this unified theory of effort for philosophical discussions in ethics, philosophy of mind, and action theory. (shrink)

This paper resolves the free will debate through empirical adequacy arguments. Building on the Fixed-Point Paradox's elimination of libertarian free will, we establish that compatibilism is the unique logically coherent and empirically adequate framework for understanding human agency. -/- We introduce five Minimal Empirical Adequacy Conditions (MEAC)—observable functional properties any scientifically adequate theory of agency must explain: deliberative sensitivity, reason-action covariance, voluntary-involuntary distinction, interventional responsiveness, and phenomenological coherence. -/- These conditions are robustly supported by neuroscience, developmental psychology, and behavioral studies. (...) -/- We prove that hard determinism faces an inescapable dilemma. -/- It must either: (1) accept all MEAC as real causal structures, thereby becoming theoretically equivalent to compatibilism (differing only in semantic labeling), or (2) deny MEAC, thereby contradicting established neuroscience. The first horn (Covert Compatibilism) collapses hard determinism into compatibilism descriptively. The second horn (Explanatory Nihilism) makes hard determinism empirically inadequate. -/- We demonstrate this through comprehensive engagement with sophisticated hard determinism, including Gregg Caruso's public health model. We prove via the Collapse Theorem that any position accepting MEAC as functional properties while grounding institutional design on deliberative capacity is theoretically equivalent to consequentialist compatibilism. -/- The paper formalizes reason-responsiveness as a measurable property (ρ-metric) and explores implications for education, criminal justice, clinical psychology, and institutional design. -/- We conclude that compatibilism is not one interpretation among many, but the minimal scientifically adequate description of human cognitive architecture. (shrink)

This paper presents a conceptual model of human agency, Existential Structural Understanding, which treats action, thought, affect, values, and philosophical stance as an integrated, multi-layered structure. The primary aim is to reconceptualize the phenomenon of “understanding what one ought to do yet being unable to act”—together with recurrent oscillations between self-negation and self-salvation—not as a deficit of willpower or character, but as a structural inconsistency between layers and modes of the self. -/- The model has two complementary dimensions. On the (...) static side, it posits seven layers (indexed 0–6): 0: biological survival; 1: order (with two internal modules: order-maintenance and order-expansion); 2: hyper-metakognition (超メタ認知) as a capacity to objectify one’s own structure; 3: values; 4: affect; 5: intention; 6: embodied layer as the integration of 0–5 into concrete action. -/- These layers are further grouped into three domains: an affective–bodily A-domain (0, 4, 6), an existential B-domain (1, 2, and the philosophical mode), and a cognitive–projective C-domain (3, 5). -/- On the dynamic side, the model distinguishes between a constant core and a variable driver. The core is defined as always located in Layer 4 (affect): affect is the experiential center of gravity that colors all access to self and world. What changes over time is the driver, i.e., the structure that orients the direction and persistence of action. The paper proposes a three-stage driver model corresponding to three philosophical modes (Ph-1, Ph-2, Ph-3): 1. Ph-1: Philosophy – the ordinary mode of life-guiding convictions; driver = intention (Layer 5). 2. Ph-2: Existential Philosophy – a mode triggered by the first recognition of the existential domain (B-domain), where a non-verbal “structural feel” of oneself emerges; driver = existential-philosophical mode, a half-structured intention. 3. Ph-3: Existential Structural Philosophy – the deepest mode, grounded in stable hyper-metakognition (Layer 2); driver = hyper-metakognition plus will (意志), where intention becomes structurally anchored and resilient. -/- Within this framework, “understanding without acting” is characterized as a state in which Layer 2 (hyper-metakognition) adequately grasps structural constraints, yet the driver remains at the level of unstructured or half-structured intention, failing to reach the level of will that could carry understanding into embodied continuity. -/- The paper articulates a genesis model tracing the emergence of agency from existence-recognition, through hyper-metakognition and “order prediction,” to philosophical stance, values, intention, and finally will. It also theorizes three routes by which the existential domain becomes accessible—despair, felt contribution to others, and radical hope—and situates them within this generative trajectory. The argument is grounded in a single, deeply analyzed autobiographical case and is offered not as a universal account of content but as a universally usable structural framework for describing human agency and its breakdowns. -/- . (shrink)

This paper pits Q — an atemporal, hypercomputational, retrocausally omnipotent agent modeled on the entity from Star Trek: The Next Generation — against the Fixed-Point Paradox (FPP). Every conceivable libertarian escape route collapses into outright contradiction or principled unverifiability: primitive haecceitistic choice, Everettian branching, oracle consultation, direct retrocausal editing of the past. The mechanism is mercilessly simple. Infallible epistemic access to a future action E (□ₖE) entails its metaphysical necessity (□ₘE) through informational closure, making counterfactual possibility (◇ₘ¬E) logically impossible: □ₖE (...) ∧ ◇ₘ¬E ⊢ ⊥. No hypercomputer, no non-computable primitive, no acausal device escapes this constraint. Probabilistic retreat merely trades logical incoherence for permanent epistemic opacity, rendering counterfactual freedom (CFF) permanently unverifiable. The result is definitive: libertarian free will is not empirically elusive or metaphysically controversial but logically impossible. Hard determinism survives the FPP's logical test but only barely — as a position that accepts the same causal structure as compatibilism while denying its implications. The deeper truth emerges from recognizing where agency actually lives: not in ontic indeterminism (quantum randomness, branching worlds) but in epistemic indeterminism — the structural opacity of the future as viewed from the present. Physical determinism can coexist with genuine agency because chronological protection (the impossibility of closed timelike curves, retrocausal signaling, and asymmetric temporal epistemic access) safeguards deliberation by preventing the toxic god's-eye view. Omniscience doesn't reveal freedom's absence; it causes freedom's destruction. Opacity is precondition, not defect. Among post-FPP survivors, compatibilism emerges as the unique framework that is both logically coherent and descriptively non-trivial, grounding agency in the measurable, cultivable capacity of reason-responsiveness. Hard determinism, by contrast, survives logic only to fail explanatory adequacy: it rests on modal and epistemic fallacies, denies the functional reality of choice while attempting to ground morality (incoherent), and ultimately amounts to denying the existence of consciousness as a causally efficacious phenomenon. The full demolition of hard determinism through empirical adequacy conditions is presented in the companion paper "On the Freedom of the Will: A Post-Paradox Reconstruction." Being epistemically vacuous, empirically unfalsifiable, and logically incoherent, counterfactual freedom belongs in the graveyard of failed theories. For the complete eliminative argument beginning with the Fixed-Point Paradox's formalization of Aristotle's Problem of Future Contingents, extending through this omnipotence proof and the empirical demolition of hard determinism via five Minimal Empirical Adequacy Conditions, concluding with the ρ-metric framework for measuring and cultivating agency, see "The Free Will Solution: A Formal Resolution to Two and a Half Millennia of Philosophical Struggle" (Golden Physics Project Press, 2025), accessible via the external link provided. (shrink)

This document is a clean structural walkthrough of the CODES epistemic law: how emergence becomes lawful, how PAS resolves the free-will/determinism split, and how the coherence substrate organizes information across physical, biological, cognitive, and social scales. It is not a replacement for the formal mathematical work; rather, it provides the conceptual lens install necessary for reading those papers correctly. -/- The central claim is that coherence (PAS_s), drift (ΔPAS_zeta), and harmonic structure (PAS_h) form the substrate layer beneath logic, probability, and (...) representation. Randomness becomes unmeasured drift. Paradox becomes misaligned states. Identity becomes a coherence-locked recursion. Agency becomes the deterministic selection of the highest-coherence future in the lawful option set DOF(t). -/- When analysis begins at the substrate, measurement collapse, emergence, morphogenesis, symbolic meaning, identity persistence, social stability, and cosmological structure all appear as coherence-driven behaviors. Free will and determinism cease to conflict: choice is coherence-gated, execution is deterministic. -/- The manuscript concludes by presenting RIC, a fully deterministic symbolic engine using fixed-point numerics and coherence-gated emission. This implementation demonstrates that the substrate law is computable, replayable, and capable of unifying physical, biological, symbolic, and social domains under one invariant. (shrink)

Many philosophers who deny moral luck in consequences also affirm that people can be morally responsible for consequences. But this conjunction of views faces a puzzle: because consequences are almost always shaped by luck, how can people be morally responsible for lucky consequences? The solution to which these philosophers appeal is to distinguish between degree and scope of moral responsibility. Although lucky consequences cannot affect how much praise or blame people deserve, people can nevertheless be morally responsible for the consequences. (...) We raise a new problem for this solution. We argue that if a person blames the wrongdoer to the full extent deserved for their action, they cannot justly blame the wrongdoer for the consequence. But that result is functionally equivalent to the view that people are not morally responsible for consequences. In both cases, blame for consequences is inapt. But this counterintuitive result is not implied by the position that resultant moral luck exists, which is a comparative point in the latter view’s favor. (shrink)

Although doubt (Tvivl) and despair (Fortvivlelse) are widely recognized as two central and closely associated concepts in Kierkegaard’s authorship, their precise relationship remains opaque in the extant interpretive literature. To shed light on their relationship, this paper develops a novel interpretation of Kierkegaard’s understanding of the connection between despair and our agency over our beliefs, and its significance for Kierkegaard’s ethics of belief. First, I show that an important yet largely overlooked form of Kierkegaardian despair involves either failing to take (...) ethico-religious responsibility for one’s practical agency over one’s beliefs, or misusing one’s practical agency over one’s beliefs by refusing to recognize or comply with externally given ethico-religious norms governing belief. Second, I argue that Kierkegaard takes properly exercising one’s agency over one’s beliefs to matter because beliefs are partly constitutive of the theological virtues (faith, hope, and love) that Kierkegaard regards as the cure for despair. (shrink)

Difficult actions such as quitting smoking present a puzzle for standard theories of rational confidence: evidence indicates a low chance of success, warranting low confidence, yet reasoning with confidence can promote success. Standard monistic accounts that identify confidence as a degree of belief cannot resolve this tension, since they allow only one rational attitude towards an agent’s success-prospects. Instead, this paper proposes Confidence Dualism (CD): rational agents can hold two distinct but complementary confidence-attitudes—epistemic confidence, which tracks evidence, and practical confidence, (...) which functions in goal-relevant reasoning. On this account, rational agents engage in Promotional Reasoning, where practical confidence rationalises choosing acts that causally improve their success prospects in goal-relevant decisions, even while epistemic confidence acknowledges that success is improbable. Thus, an agent can rationally act as if quitting is likely while being aware that it is not. CD avoids the shortcomings of the standard monistic account and integrates epistemic and practical demands of agency in a more nuanced theory of rational confidence. (shrink)

Following the social conception of moral agency, this paper claims that many beings commonly exempted from moral responsibility, like young children, adults with late-stage dementia, and nonhuman animals, may nevertheless qualify as participants in moral responsibility practices. Blame and other moral responsibility responses are understood according to the communicative emotion account of the reactive attitudes. To blame someone means having an emotion episode that acts as a vehicle for conveying a particular moral content. Therefore, moral agency is argued to be (...) manifested in communicative exchanges between a claimant and a defendant. While many human and nonhuman agents are justifiably exempted from ascriptions of moral responsibility, this does not necessarily exclude such agents from the community of moral agents altogether. Toddlers and dogs, for instance, seem capable of other-directed reactive attitudes, like resentment, and could, therefore, qualify as participants in moral responsibility practices with respect to the claimant position. Therefore, we may have reason to adopt a distinct claimant-directed participant stance to some beings, even if they fail to qualify as apt targets of blame. This expanded theoretical room for moral agency is argued to make explicit further normative considerations. (shrink)

A growing chorus of AI researchers and philosophers posit internal representations in large language models (LLMs). But how do these representations relate to the kinds of mental states we routinely ascribe to our fellow humans? While some research has focused on belief- or knowledge- like states in LLMs, there has been comparatively little focus on the question of whether LLMs have intentions. I survey five properties that have been associated with intentions in the philosophical literature, and assess two candidate classes (...) of LLM representations against this set of features. The result is mixed: LLMs have representations that are intention-like in many— perhaps surprising—respects, but they differ from human intentions in important ways. (shrink)

I defend pluralist metaethical constitutivism: practical norms governing an agent are grounded in her kind of rational agency. Kinds of rational agency are defined in terms of reasons explanations: to be a given kind of rational agent is for one’s actions to admit of certain forms of reasons explanation. Unlike extant, ‘monist’ constitutivists, pluralists need not say that there are constitutive standards of rational agency as such—just that there are constitutive standards of our kind of agency. They can thus admit (...) the possibility of ‘minimal’ agents whose agency cannot ground any practical norms, retaining the virtues of monist constitutivism without its costs. (shrink)

This chapter explores some conceptual connections between human-centered artificial intelligence (HCAI) research and empathic AI. First, I argue that HCAI is best understood as a framework that centers human well-being in AI development and deployment. Second, I argue a fruitful way to make the framework more precise is by focusing on human practical capacities. I use empathy as a case study, examining recent positive accounts of empathetic AI from the perspective of a well-being-focused HCAI. Finally, I note how this approach (...) relates to recent calls for a sociotechnical perspective on AI. (shrink)

There is disagreement among philosophers about the following claim: when we share an intention to perform some action, we each have an intention towards that action. That disagreement turns on the interpretation of thought experiments, specifically whether reports of a shared intention are accurate in cases in which one of the participants lacks a participatory intention. We subject the standard interpretations of thought experiments to empirical testing. Our results suggest that attributions of shared intentions are appropriate only when each individual (...) has a participatory intention, supporting accounts of shared intention that include participatory intentions as a necessary component. (shrink)

This paper reviews the complex and nuanced treatment of metaphysics in the first major works of Jacques Derrida (1967-72), and it supplements deconstruction with existential themes in order to safeguard it from the accusation of nihilistic relativism. The critique of logocentrism, often systematized through a paradoxical 'ontology of the trace', has been embraced by phenomenology and post-deconstruction, but also seen as insufficient for today's challenges. Returning to Derrida's demonstrations, I explore why metaphysics must be textual if it is to produce (...) two operations constitutive of thinking: a certain technology of forgetting and an experience of meaning as singularized in words. This textuality is, specifically, that of writing, which reveals how, beyond truth, it is meaning-making that is sought by metaphysics and its writers. The techne of writing, then, plays a special role in individual, existential empowerment, but this interpretation of the history of ideas as a power struggle does not amount to moral relativism, because writing can help us sustain a unique and constructive passion for the margins. (shrink)

Aesthetic blight is persistently aversive aesthetic experience to which someone has been made systematically vulnerable by virtue of their identity, embodiment, or disempowered social position. Aesthetic blight undermines well-being and signals societal disregard, so justice requires working to eliminate it. An obvious solution is to clear up whatever stimuli are causing the aversive experience. But this strategy has its limits: it is not sensitive to variability in responses to stimuli, often produces an aesthetically bland environment, and generates further injustice when (...) human bodies and cultural products are among the stimuli perceived as aversive. A closer look reveals that aesthetic blight is not just a matter of aversive stimuli. It involves restrictions on aesthetic agency, conceived as taking two forms: agency to act on the world in response to our aesthetic evaluations (e.g., removing an aversive stimulus) and agency to act on our system of aesthetic evaluations to transform our responses—where the latter involves conceiving aversiveness not as a fixed quality of things, but as a potentially malleable quality of experience. By restoring people’s agency both to create valuable aesthetic environments and to transform their aversive responses in some circumstances, we can alleviate aesthetic blight without producing further injustice. (shrink)

In All Things Act, Mercedes Valmisa argues that there is no such thing as an individual action and that all actions are constituted and performed by a diverse array of entities. Examining the collective character of action, this book rejects the view of agency as a capacity--especially one limited to humans--and redefines agency as an umbrella term for the concrete sociomaterial processes that emerge from the collaborative efforts of multiple entities acting together. Agency is not the faculty of an individual (...) entity or self; it is always the function of a network or assembly of actors. The book also considers the significant role of nonhuman actors in these processes--things without intentions, will, or even awareness. This relational and collective approach shifts the focus away from mental states, emphasizing instead how humans and nonhumans alike participate in, contribute to, and shape the unfolding of events. -/- This expanded conception of agency draws on Classical Chinese philosophy, analytic metaphysics on powers and emergence, scientific literature on self-organization, and insights from sociology, anthropology, and art to co-create a groundbreaking framework for understanding agency, with profound sociopolitical implications for contemporary life. -/- If our actions are not simply the product of individual intentional selves but are instead constituted through dynamic interactions with a vibrant array of nonhuman actors, we are invited--and compelled--to rethink our identities, intentions, powers, emotions, responsibilities, institutions, policies, and values in ways that are less individualistic and more relational and interdependent. (shrink)

The following paper will provide an attempt to philosophically ground the study of games, finding the conditions for a general concept of ‘game’, where such conditions must be able: 1) to delimit what a game is (distinct from another while preserving the same universal features), 2) to provide a demarcative notion (which defines what a game is but also what a game isn’t), and 3) to explain how a game can be constitutive of meaning (that is a kind of content), (...) such that can be subject of analysis independently of an specific context (whilst always presupposing a context that is). The current approach to this philosophical grounding will take inspiration from contemporary epistemology, and philosophy of mind and language. Starting from the analogy of ‘language as a game’ I’ll provide an argument to reverse it so there’s a way to understand ‘game as a language’ and apply several philosophical concepts valid to language analysis. Therefore, my aim is to show that to ground the notion of game, and by extension a general study of games, there is no possible a priori starting point, so a holistic non-reductive approach is a requiremente as well. I’ll show this by underlining the obstacles of choosing an a priori starting point (focused on norms or agency), proposing to understand the constitutive relation between rules and agents as immanent. (shrink)

This paper explores how insights from the philosophy of collective agency can inform the development of coalition logic, focusing particularly on the conceptual distinctions among intentionality, preference, and coalitional power as foundational elements. While the interdisciplinary discussion mainly adopts a philosophical perspective, we also propose specific directions for broadening and refining coalition logic through philosophical theories. This expansion sheds light on phenomena often overlooked by logicians, including unstable joint actions, exogenous power, and the role of coalitional structures.

The ‘right to be known’ has traditionally been interpreted from a human-centric and individualistic perspective unsuitable for resolving the environmental crises of our epoch. Given the political need to raise collective awareness about the interconnectedness of the human and more-than-human worlds, we establish a dialogue between Indigenous and Western philosophies about the rights of more-than-human entities to be known and cared for. We consider a Western Australian Indigenous community’s advocacy on behalf of ‘Martuwarra’, a non-anthropocentric socio-environmental structure that encompasses the (...) cultural ecosystem of a river (the ‘Fitzroy River’ in colonial nomenclature) and the Indigenous groups with ontologies and First Laws belonging to that ecosystem. For the First Peoples of Martuwarra, their cultural ecosystem is a custodial group agent that is the victim of an epistemic injustice. The advocacy on behalf of Martuwarra, we suggest, is an act of Indigenous truth-telling that establishes the custodial group agent’s right to be known and which seeks to entrench restorative norms of justice as part of a moral revolution. We address contractualist and other objections to our proposal and discuss the benefits of theorising the rights of custodial group agents. (shrink)

According to a long philosophical tradition and a potent kernel of common sense, loving partnerships are governed by affection and care, and so not properly evaluated by standards of justice or fairness. In this paper I precisify and challenge this idea. I argue that love and fairness are unified in the sense that some partners are only able to perform particular act-types (loving and expressing love) if their actions are sensitive to considerations of fairness. When loving acts are aimed at (...) “sharing a life”, we properly evaluate more-basic acts of sharing – where this concerns their adherence to standards of fairness – as a way of evaluating them as complex acts of loving. Life-sharing offers an attractive feminist ideal of love, immune to concerns about the alleged imposition of fairness-related considerations where they don’t belong. (shrink)

In diesem Artikel zeige ich auf, dass das in der aristotelischen Schrift 'De Anima' beschriebene Konzept einer eng mit den Lebensfunktionen von Organismen verbundenen Seele/Psyche auch aus heutiger biowissenschaftlicher Sicht noch Bestand hat. Dies gilt insbesondere auch für die drei Komponenten, in welche die Psyche gemäss Aristoteles unterteilt werden kann: Die ‘Anima rationalis’ repräsentiert die menschliche Fähigkeit zu vernünftigem Denken, die ‘Anima sensitiva’ die Fähigkeit tierischer Lebewesen zu sinnlicher Wahrnehmung und triebgesteuerter Bewegungskontrolle, währenddem die allen Lebewesen zukommenden biologischen Grundfunktionen wie (...) Stoffwechsel, Nahrungsaufnahme, Wachstum und Organbildung dem Bereich der ‘Anima vegetativa’ zugeordnet werden. Ein weiterer zentraler Aspekt der aristotelischen Biopsychologie, welcher erst seit kurzem wieder Einzug in die modernen Biowissenschaften hält, ist das Verständnis lebender Organismen als Akteure, die zu zielgerichteter Tätigkeit befähigt sind. Währenddem Evolutionswissenschaftler dafür den Begriff ‘Agency’ verwenden und analysieren, wie diese Fähigkeit mit der biochemischen Entstehung von Leben und der natürlichen Selektion zusammenhängt, spricht Aristoteles davon, die Psyche sei die Wesenheit (eidos) und der Zweck (telos) eines natürlichen, lebensfähigen Körpers und dieser bloß ihr Werkzeug (organon). Auch wenn sich die aristotelische und die moderne Biologie bezüglich ihres wissenschaftlichen Hintergrundes stark unterscheiden, stimmen beide in ihrer Quintessenz weitgehend überein: Das, was einen biologischen Organismus ausmacht, ist seine Fähigkeit, selbst etwas zu tun zum Zweck seiner Selbsterhaltung, sei es als Individuum, sei es durch Reproduktion als Spezies. Die Seele/Psyche im aristotelischen Sinne erfüllt damit nicht nur irgendeine biologische Funktion, sondern die zentrale Lebensfunktion biologischer Organismen schlechthin. Der vorliegende Artikel versteht sich als einführender Teil einer dreiteiligen Serie im ‘Aphin-Rundbrief’ zur Analyse des aristotelischen Konzepts der Psyche aus dem Blickwinkel der modernen Life Sciences. Im 2026 erscheinenden Folgeartikel wird die Frage vertieft, welches Potenzial dieses zur Überwindung des Leib-Seele-Problems und zur Erklärung von Entstehung und Funktion des Bewusstseins enthält. Im dritten Artikel wird dann gezeigt, dass darauf ein akteurkausales Modell der Willensfreiheit aufgebaut werden kann, welches im Einklang mit einer zeitgenössischen, naturalistischen Erklärung der Handlungsfähigkeit steht. (shrink)

While there has been much discussion of whether AI systems could function as moral agents or acquire sentience, there has been very little discussion of whether AI systems could have free will. I sketch a framework for thinking about this question, inspired by Daniel Dennett’s work. I argue that, to determine whether an AI system has free will, we should not look for some mysterious property, expect its underlying algorithms to be indeterministic, or ask whether the system is unpredictable. Rather, (...) we should simply ask whether we have good explanatory reasons to view the system as an intentional agent, with the capacity for choice between alternative possibilities and control over the resulting actions. If the answer is “yes”, then the system counts as having free will in a pragmatic and diagnostically useful sense. (shrink)

My dissertation is about Hegel’s account of the connection between self-consciousness, freedom, and human sociality in the fourth chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit. That account has long attracted readers for its claim that the freedom of self-conscious subjects can only be realized through social relationships. But scholars have struggled to give a clear and convincing account of that claim. The standard view takes Hegel to combine a Kantian notion of rational autonomy with a conception of reason and norms of (...) rationality as socially constituted. I argue that this view is mistaken, both as a reading of this chapter of the Phenomenology and as an interpretation of the broader social theory of freedom that Hegel introduces in it. The central theme of Hegel’s account of recognition is not that of overcoming natural heteronomy through universal normative principles—regardless of whether or not such norms are socially constituted. In fact, this very conception of freedom holds only a secondary, subordinate status for Hegel. Instead, I argue, Hegel’s account of recognition marks a decisive turn away from Kantian conceptions of freedom toward more Aristotelian conceptions of subjectivity and the collective self-sufficiency of a community. Specifically, Hegel’s account focuses on the internal teleological structure of self-conscious life and action and its implications for human freedom. The central notion of freedom here thus concerns a kind of self-sufficiency or Selbständigkeit — successfully existing for oneself without constraint to one’s inner purposes. Accordingly, I argue that the central claim in Hegel’s account of recognition is that the subject’s individual freedom and self-fulfillment can only be truly realized through relations of reciprocal action and shared internal purposiveness with other subjects. For Hegel, the higher practical freedom achieved through social life is not primarily founded upon shared rights or shared norms but, rather, a shared life. It concerns the “Zusammenleben des Menschen” (Encyclopaedia ❡433) in the strict sense of the term: a unified internal purpose sustained through the reciprocal action of its members, where each is, for the others, both a necessary means and an end in itself. For Hegel, this shared life is the true ground and inner purpose of all rights, norms, and mores. (shrink)

Visual thinking is a systematic way to produce knowledge in design by means of mental imagery, spatial reasoning, and the use of an array of visual representations. Pictorial representations such as sketches are crucial for the activity of designing at the early stage of the creative process. Designers see more information in sketches than was actually drawn. The ability to see more information than is sketched out can be seen as an enhanced visual capacity of human agency. Enhanced agency is (...) the prosthetic incorporation of artifacts to improve the original agentive capacities. The incorporation of artifacts to draw raises some fundamental questions: Is the pencil an extension of the mind? Can we think with our hands? What agentive capacities are increased with the use of the pencil? What is the representational status of sketching? The chapter is structured around these key questions to suggest some answers inspired by the work of Göran Sonesson. Using the notion of enhanced agency and the layered model of agency, I explore the way in which the pencil improves the visual thinking of design. In doing so I found that it is important to maintain the principle of asymmetry in cognitive systems to reconsider relational ontology in favor of ecological relationships. (shrink)

This chapter proposes a classification of artifacts based on an agentive approach—that is, on the actions performed by human agents rather than on the artifacts' functions or features. The agentive approach adheres to the thesis that cognition is not reduced to brain functions but is coextensive with the capacity to act. If there is action, then there is cognition, and therefore, meaning emerges from an agent's relationship with its environment (enaction). It is argued that the notion of Enhanced Agency—the incorporation (...) of artifacts to enhance the performance of actions—is a distinctive feature of the human species, and that the ability to design artifacts is distinct from the creation of natural objects by other animals. Therefore, the definition of artifact is limited to an object created by human beings for a specific purpose. Consequently, after critically assessing other proposals, the classification of artifacts is addressed under three criteria: according to the type of incorporation; according to the type of engagement; and according to the type of action performed by the agents. This typology allows us to resolve ambivalent categories such as cognitive/pragmatic and to be consistent with the material and embodied commitment of cognition, which constitutes a contribution to the understanding of the essentially enhanced nature of human agency. (shrink)