WORLDVIEW ETHICS — What are Enactive Agents?

Defining Agency

What is the differentiating factor of agency that enables us to best get a handle on what consciousness is and where it comes from in the enactivist model?

Suitable differentiators should be present in living conscious organisms but should be abstract enough from life itself to denote any process in which a decision is made and to refer to any sort of thing that turns out to be capable of taking action on the basis of decisions made. The definition of agency is simple enough: it is the capacity of an object for the action of animus, the driving force behind the changes in the world caused by life and living bodies, in the broad sense.

In the narrower philosophical sense, agency is a faculty people have and can train. For agents as complex as people, sometimes referred to as moral agents, agency is a spectrum — prisoners and slaves and children sit at one end, and grown adult people who have the capacity to navigate their society spread out toward the other end, thinning until only the best decisionmakers who see the furthest remain because they have the most agency.

More concretely, agency scales with the organism. It begins with an impulse in a single cell, but collectives of approximately thirty-seven trillion cells in individual human bodies learn to work…