We like to imagine agency as a property: a hidden force within the mind, ready to will outcomes into being. This is a comforting fiction. In reality, agency is relational leverage — the emergent capacity to actualise potential when alignments converge across biological, semiotic, social, and ecological lattices.
Action is not born inside. It arises at the intersections:
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Emergent from alignment: Action occurs when relational currents converge to create pathways of actualisation. Thought, body, and environment resonate in coordination, amplifying particular potentials.
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Leverage, not volition: Agency is not inner will; it is the capacity to shape outcomes by exploiting structural alignments in a network of interacting potentials. Decisions are effects of lattice dynamics, not antecedent causes.
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Context-sensitive: The same organism can leverage potentials differently depending on relational context. Action is therefore contingent, situated, and dynamic — not fixed or predetermined.
This perspective reframes familiar notions of responsibility, choice, and ethics:
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“Decision-making” is no longer an internal struggle of free will. It is the navigation of relational lattices.
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“Influence” is not coercion alone. It is the ability to reconfigure alignments of potential, amplifying some patterns while suppressing others.
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“Power” is emergent leverage within relational networks, not an attribute stored in individuals.
In practice, this means humans are operators within a circulating lattice of potential, constantly sensing, adjusting, and amplifying alignments. Agency is relational, participatory, and generative. It is the dynamic leverage that enables the vortex of potentials we call “human” to act in the world.
In short: agency is not what we have; it is what we enact. It is not inside; it is between, at the points where potential converges and flows. To understand human action, we must study relational alignment, not internal essence.
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