David's theory of evolution: Stephen Talbott's view; agency (Evolution)

by David Turell , Monday, October 24, 2022, 18:21 (543 days ago) @ David Turell

An essay on agency in biology:

https://aeon.co/essays/the-biological-research-putting-purpose-back-into-life?utm_sourc...

we now have growing reasons to suspect that agency is a genuine natural phenomenon. Biology could stop being so coy about it if only we had a proper theory of how it arises. Unfortunately, no such thing currently exists, but there’s increasing optimism that a theory of agency can be found – and, moreover, that it’s not necessarily unique to living organisms. A grasp of just what it is that enables an entity to act as an autonomous agent, altering its behaviour and environment to achieve certain ends, should help reconcile biology to the troublesome notions of purpose and function.

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This reveals a crucial dimension of agency: the ability to make choices in response to new and unforeseen circumstances.

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Agency stems from two ingredients: first, an ability to produce different responses to identical (or equivalent) stimuli, and second, to select between them in a goal-directed way. Neither of these capacities is unique to humans, nor to brains in general.

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Generating behavioural alternatives isn’t the same as agency, but it’s a necessary condition. It’s in the selection from this range of choices that true agency consists. This selection is goal-motivated: an organism does this and not that because it figures this would make it more likely to attain the desired outcome.

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To get to the nub of agency, we need to leave biology behind. Instead, we can look at agency through the prism of the physics of information, and reflect on the role that information processing plays in bringing about change.

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This link between organisation, information and agency is finally starting to appear, as scientists now explore the fertile intersection of information theory, thermodynamics and life. In 2012, Susanne Still, working with Gavin Crooks of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California and others, showed why it’s vital for a goal-directed entity such as a cell, an animal or even a tiny demon to have a memory. With a memory, any agent can store a representation of the environment that it can then draw upon to make predictions about the future, enabling it to anticipate, prepare and make the best possible use of its energy – that is, to operate efficiently.

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Crooks and their colleagues found that efficiency depends on an ability to focus only on information that’s useful for predicting what the environment is going to be like moments later, and filtering out the rest. In other words, it’s a matter of identifying and storing meaningful information: that which is useful to attaining your goal.

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Here, is a possible story we can tell about how genuine biological agency arises, without recourse to mysticism. Evolution creates and reinforces goals – energy-efficiency, say – but doesn’t specify the way to attain them. Rather, an organism selected for efficiency will evolve a memory to store and represent aspects of its environment that are salient to that end. That’s what creates the raw material for agency.

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organisms with memories that permit ‘contemplation’ of alternative actions, based on their internal representations of the environment, could make more effective choices. Brains aren’t essential for that (though they can help). There, in a nutshell, is agency.

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The crucial point of all this is that agency – like consciousness, and indeed life itself – isn’t just something you can perceive by squinting at the fine details. Nor is it some second-order effect, with particles behaving ‘as if’ they’re agents, perhaps even conscious agents, when enough of them get together. Agents are genuine causes in their own right, and don’t deserve to be relegated to scare quotes. Those who object can do so only because we’ve so far failed to find adequate theories to explain how agency comes about. But maybe that’s just because we’ve failed to seek them in the right places – until now.

Comment: agency shows purposeful activity. This essay shows the use of memory and information, both actively sensed and stored. DNA is a required code to do this. The article presumes this complex arrangement simply evolved. I think it was obviously designed.