Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.
"Concepts of Agency in Biology" (Okasha, 2023) - Brief Paper Summary
3clem_acs
2particlemania
1Mateusz Bagiński
New Comment
Motivation 1 ('organisms-as-agents thesis') "says that organisms really do exhibit some or even all of the attributes of agency". Motivation 2 ('organism-as-agents heuristic') "says that it can be heuristically useful to treat organisms as if they were agents for certain intellectual purposes".
It's interesting that both motivations appear to be about modelling organisms as agents, as opposed to any other level of organisation. This feels like it misses some of the most interesting insights we might get from biological agency, namely those around agents at different levels of organisation interacting - e.g: ants and ant colonies, cancer cells and multicellular organisms, or individual organisms and selection pressures (which could be treated as as-if agents at evolutionary timescales).
1Okasha's paper is addressing emerging discussions in biology that are talking about organisms-as-agents in particular, otherwise being called the Return of the Organism turn in philosophy of biology.
In the paper, he adds "Various concepts have been offered as ways of fleshing out this idea of organismic autonomy, including goal-directedness, functional organization, emergence, self-maintenance, and individuality. Agency is another possible candidate for the job."
This seems like a reasonable stance so far as I can tell, since organisms seem to have some structural integrity -- in what can make delineated cartesian boundaries well-defined.
For collectives, a similar discussion may surface additional upsides and downsides to agency concepts, that may not apply at organism levels.
"The 'organism-as-agent' idea is seen by some authors as a potential corrective to gene-centrism, emphasizing as it does the power of organisms to make choices, overcome challenges, modify their environment, and shape their own fate. "
I don't see much friction here. It seems perfectly coherent with gene-centrism that sometimes the most optimal thing for a gene to do in order to "advance its fitness" is to make an agentic organism competently pursuing some goals/acting on some drives that are beneficial for the "selfish" gene.
(Nor is it entirely clear, for that matter, whether they should, i.e. whether "long range consequentialism" points at anything real and coherent).
I agree that it may not point to anything real (in the sense of "realizable in our universe"), but I'd be curious to hear why you think it may not even be coherent and in what sense.
I wonder whether, by trying to formalize the fuzzy concept of agency (plausibly originating in an inductive bias that was selected for because of the need to model animals of one's own and different species) that we already have, we are not shooting ourselves into the foot. A review of what relationships people see between "agency" and other salient concepts (autonomy, goals, rationality, intelligence, "internally originated" behavior, etc) is probably valuable just because of locally disentangling our semantic web and giving us more material to work with, but perhaps we should aim for finding more legible/clearly specified/measurable properties/processes in the world that we consider relevant and build our ontology bottom-up from them.