An organism acts within a field of possibilities.
But its actions do not simply select among possibilities that were already there.
They can change the field itself.
A root grows into the soil and alters the space through which its future roots will grow. A tree changes the light, moisture and temperature around it. A spider constructs a web that transforms an empty space into a structured environment of traps and pathways.
An organism therefore does something stranger than merely respond to its circumstances:
it changes the circumstances to which it will subsequently respond.
This gives agency a recursive character.
At first, an organism acts because its organisation makes certain possibilities available.
But the result of that action changes the organisation's subsequent possibilities.
The organism has entered a loop with its own future.
Consider a simple example.
A plant grows toward light. As it grows, its leaves intercept more light. That changes the plant's energy supply, which affects further growth. Its own activity has altered the conditions under which its next activity occurs.
There is no need to imagine a plan.
The plant does not have to represent its future.
Its present activity simply becomes part of the causal environment of its future self.
This is one of the deepest differences between an organism and a passive object.
A stone can alter its surroundings when it falls. But the altered surroundings do not normally become part of a self-maintaining process through which the stone regulates its subsequent existence.
An organism continually encounters the consequences of its own activity.
And those consequences can become resources, constraints, opportunities or dangers.
The distinction between organism and environment therefore becomes less straightforward.
The environment is partly inherited.
But it is also partly made.
Beavers construct dams. Ants modify their nests. Birds build territories and nests. Humans transform landscapes on an extraordinary scale.
The phenomenon is often called niche construction, but the underlying idea is simpler: organisms do not merely adapt to environments; through living, they alter the environments to which they are adapted.
This changes how we should understand adaptation itself.
The organism is not simply being shaped by an external world.
There is a reciprocal process:
organism → environment → organism.
The environment selects among the organism's possibilities.
The organism modifies the environment.
The modified environment changes the possibilities again.
Agency therefore becomes something distributed across a history of interactions.
This also gives us a new understanding of learning.
Learning need not begin with a mind representing information.
A system can acquire a changed relation to its possibilities simply because previous activity has altered what it can subsequently do.
The history of the organism becomes part of the organisation of its future.
A path worn through a landscape, a burrow constructed in soil, a web suspended between branches, a neural connection strengthened by experience—all can be understood as ways in which the past changes the possibilities of the future.
The organism is no longer merely a system that persists.
It is a system whose persistence can be historically modified by its own activity.
That is a major development in agency.
The present is no longer determined solely by inherited structure and immediate circumstance.
What the organism has done can become part of what the organism can do.
And as this recursive structure becomes more elaborate, agency can become increasingly flexible.
The organism can encounter a situation that it has never encountered before, because its previous activity has changed the repertoire with which it meets the new situation.
Eventually, in animals with sufficiently complex nervous systems, this can become learning, exploration, anticipation and planning.
But those are elaborations of a much older pattern.
The deepest novelty is not that an organism eventually learns to predict its future.
It is that the organism can participate in producing the conditions from which its own future emerges.
Agency, then, is not simply the capacity to cause something.
Almost everything causes something.
Agency is closer to the capacity to enter into a recursive relation in which what the system does becomes part of what the system can subsequently do.
The organism is therefore not merely carried into the future.
In a small but genuine sense, it helps to make the future in which it will find itself.
And that gives agency its temporal depth.
An organism acts now.
But part of what its action does is to determine the organism that will act later.
No comments:
Post a Comment