On the Self-Organizing Origins of Agency

Abstract

The question of agency and directedness in living systems has puzzled philosophers and scientists for centuries. What principles and mechanisms underlie the emergence of agency? Analysis and dynamical modeling of experiments on human infants suggest that the birth of agency is due to a eureka-like, pattern forming phase transition in which the infant suddenly realizes it can make things happen in the world. The main mechanism involves positive feedback: when the baby's initially spontaneous movements cause the world to change, their perceived consequences have a sudden and sustained amplifying effect on the baby's further actions. The baby discovers itself as a causal agent. Some implications of this theory are discussed. KeywordsCoordination Dynamics; collective variables; phase transition; positive feedback; emergence; agent; consciousness; synchrony; metastability What is this 'I'?We humans tend to believe that we are agents, masters and mistresses of our fate, that our deeds and desires are our destiny. Yet despite a sizeable literature on 'the sense of agency' and its behavioral and neuroimaging correlates (see [1,2] for recent reviews) the scientific basis of causal agency and how we come to experience ourselves as agents is lacking. Agency means action towards an end. When it comes to the behavior of living things, our inability to understand end-directedness forces us to posit (often implicitly) an intelligent agent residing somewhere inside the system that is responsible for the end-directed behavior we observe. The self as casual agent remains a ghost in the machine awaiting exorcism, perhaps, by new insights from the brain and cognitive sciences.Charles Darwin, in On the Origin of Species touched only briefly on the topic of agency though he noted how 'admirably adapted' was the woodpecker to catch insects under the Publisher's Disclaimer: This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published in its final citable form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain. Franklin Fearing [5] noted that "Even before man speculated about the nature and source of his own experiences, he was probably curious about the agencies by which animal motion was effected" (p.1). Life and motion, Fearing remarks, are almost synonymous terms. HHS Public AccessIn his famous book, "What is life?" Erwin Schrödinger [6] one of the chief architects of quantum mechanics and the author of the famous equation that bears his name, proposed an "order from order" principle as the physical basis of life. Schrödinger speculated that this new kind of order took the form of an aperiodic crystal, later exposed as the beautiful double helical structure of the DNA molecule [7]. Not much mor...

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