Agency
The idea that we do not have agency is a hard one to pick apart. Especially, when we’ve heard that the universe is all one thing and that the deterministic laws of the universe apply everywhere.
But, it isn’t so.
Sometimes energy, when it is in excess, can be used to build up organization and structure faster than the Second Law can tear it down. Life, itself, is a clear example of this. And we are not short of energy here on Earth where it rains down from our sun.
In general, the Second Law of Thermodynamics says that energy will dissipate as we work towards the heat death of the universe. But in specific situations, for a time, the reverse can happen, locally. To see this in action, consider the case of self-replicating molecules, which are very specific and rare arrangements of matter. Self-replicating molecules can avoid the degradation’s of the Second Law if they do these things:
- Harvest the energy necessary to drive the reaction
- Access the materials necessary build the new replicant
- Remain in the necessary environment conditions such as temperature and pH
Once the self-replication process starts, it continues indefinitely; so long as the required conditions continue to be met. Self-Replicating Molecules were the first crack in the edifice of Determinism. I.e., the fact that self-replicating molecules can avoid the degradation of the Second Law and thus maintain ordered structures; insulated from deterministic forces. Once self-replication is underway, it is not a static thing which just repeats itself over and over.
Rather, competition among the replicants, changing conditions and selection processes will naturally occur among the replicators. And it is during these events that significant changes and improvements can occur. And these changes and improvements, in turn, can open up new, additional possibility spaces.
The net effect of these processes of change is a constant improvement of function. I.e., the replicants get better at withstanding the degradation’s of the Second Law. This is an example of Non-Fragility. I.e., a process that does not merely withstand shocks but actually improves because of them.
The early self-replicating molecules are strongly thought to have evolved into biology as we know it today. The causal link seem obvious because biological life-forms are just more complex forms of self-replicators. Exactly how self-replicating molecules transitioned to become biological self-replicators is not known. Nick Lane, a British Biochemist, has written some excellent books which speculate about the possible transition pathways from self-replicating molecules to the earliest cellular life forms. Take a look if you’d like to delve deeper into this topic.
See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vital_Question
and
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/58999183-transformer
From here forward in this essay, we are going to take it as a given that biological self-replication evolved from the earlier molecular self-replication. So all references hereinafter to replication or self-replication will now be biological references.
What we’ve described about self-replication doesn’t seem particularly complicated. But the significance of this emergent property is simply impossible to over emphasize.
It is the core mechanism of all biological evolution and life. And so long as energy, materials and suitable conditions remain available, replication will continue.
But the most significant advances in self-replication come about, in general, through increased complexity.
Why?
Because additional complexity often serves as the spawning ground for new capabilities. And new capabilities, by their very nature, open up new possibility spaces of their own.
Consider the fish that learned to breath and crawled out of the sea to find the empty continents waiting. The feathered dinosaurs that learned to fly and found untouched aerial niches waiting to exploit. And the animals which developed warm bloodedness and found new territories and climates to occupy. Increasing complexity and the opening of new possibility spaces go inevitably together.
Here’s an image depicting the advance of self-replicating biological life forms over the past 3.5 billion years. Consider all the niches and possibility spaces that were opened over this time. And consider also that all this occurred because a small self-replicating molecule, came together by chance long ago and used excess energy to insulate itself from the inanimate degradation’s of the Second Law of Thermodynamics:
https://evogeneao.s3.amazonaws.com/images/tree_of_life/tree-of-life_2000.png
The chart clearly shows that animate nature has figured how to get around the degradation’s of The Second Law of Thermodynamics.
As life spread and opened up new niches and became more and more complex, the competition among life forms for energy, resources and optimal conditions became ever more intense. We humans are animals and we are arguably the most complex creatures on the planet.
Let’s focus on the animal branches of the tree of life and follow along. Early on animals evolved to have three types of cells. Inner cells, which form the food passage (the gut), outer cells, which separate the animal from the outside world (the skin) and specialized nervous system cells which are responsible for collecting and transmitting information throughout the animal.
Animals move. And thus their external situations changes frequently. Therefore, having information about the external environment obviously has survival value. And this is what animal nervous systems evolved to do.
As animal life evolved from worms > fish > amphibians > reptiles > birds > animals, their problem solving abilities and strategies can be seen to be improving and much of this was due to their nervous system advances.
They advanced through a whole series of new and more complex adaptations; including reactions, instincts, memory, developing the several senses, creating an internal mental model of the external reality, emotions, reasoning, homeostatic mechanisms and many other capabilities.
Each of these new capabilities improved on what proceeded them. And each was added as an overlay to the previous solutions; rather than replacing them. This is an important distinction, so hang onto it.
One very important thing that was increasing was intelligence. Intelligence is what we call an animal’s ever increasing ability to solve harder and harder problems so it can survive and to propagate. The increase in intelligence and nervous system capabilities went hand-in-hand.
Problem solving in the beginning was pretty simply. See food, go get it. See danger, run away. But soon things got more complicated and meta decisions became necessary.
What if you see food and danger at the same time? Remember the jokes about asking a computer an impossible question and watching it grind to a halt as it tried to answer the question?
Animals with simple instinctual reactions would have faced that problem. And so, meta processing would have evolved to deal with it.
And then there’s the idea that as problems of survival get harder and harder to predict, the optimal solution strategies have to get more and more generalized to keep up.
Consider that if you don’t know where a threat is coming from, it does you little good to have a set of stock instinctual responses to draw from. It is far better, to evaluate the situation without preconceptions and then form an appropriate response as a result of the evaluation.
Rudimentary forms of awareness would have been appearing as these adaptations unfolded.
Awareness is, functionally, a meta-level mental space in which new and unexpected situations are evaluated.
Picture awareness as making use of previous mental capabilities. It draws on memory to retrieve the past in order to predict the future. It observes the internal mental models of the external reality held in the mind. It employs reasoning to consider the relationships between causes and effects. In short, it draws on as many of other capabilities as are appropriate in order to make an appropriate high level decision.
But awareness doesn’t know it is aware. It is just looking outwards.
Self-awareness appears when the mind’s memory model of external reality is improved to include a representation of ‘me’; the viewer of the model.
A model which now contains ‘me’, the viewer, is more functional than one which does not. As an adaptation, an awareness that is aware of itself isn’t just a bit more powerful. It is, in fact, one of the most powerful (and problematic) evolutionary adaptations that have ever occurred.
At every step along the way, from the simplest self-replicating molecule until the self-aware ‘you’ which sits there reading this sentence, the degradation’s of the Second Law of Thermodynamics have been held off by an ever greater array of sophisticated evolutionary adaptations which began as increasingly sophisticated variations in inorganic chemistry and advanced until they transitioned into the simplest forms of biological life.
And then, once expressing themselves as biology, these adaptations advanced again from bacteria thorough the entire tree of life until they attained the level of self-aware minds able to regard their own awareness and existence.
So, where is agency in all of this, you say?
It is all Agency writ large.
Agency: Intentional actions undertaken for the express purpose of allowing the entity performing the actions to survive. This is local agency. Agency concerned about the replicating unit. But agency none-the-less.
Perhaps, you are thinking that it is all still mechanical? Just the result of neurons firing as they have been long-trained to do and no one is really at home deciding anything?
Here are three very short stories to consider:
- Your finger touches a hot stove. The pain signals travel from the finger to the spinal cord. And signals are immediately returned from the spinal cord directing the arm muscles to move your finger away. The pain signals also move up the spinal cord into the brain. And the subjective experience of the brain is to believe that it ordered the finger to move.
- You feel a tinge of hunger and you turn and look at the cookie on the plate beside you. You feel that you want it and reach out to take it. The hunger signals arose from far down in your old brain and was experienced in your awareness. The decision to take the cookie feels like it was your brain’s decision. But scientist tell us that they can see the decision firing in your neurons well before you think you’ve decided to take the cookie. Regardless, your experience is that you were aware of and orchestrated the entire thing; from the recognition of hunger, to the decision that you wanted it and then onto the movement to take it.
- You have a bus schedule in your hand. You know you need to be in Pasadena by 2:30 pm. You study the table to see when you’ll need to leave home in order to catch the bus that will get you there a bit before 2:30 pm. As you work all this out and decide which bus to take, there are no anticipatory neural firings in play. Indeed, how could any of the systems outside of your awareness know what to do? Perhaps, some will fire at the end of your decision-making process when the decision is filed in your memory by processes below your awareness.
In the first story, older parts of your nervous system have acted to move your finger from the source of danger, Your conscious awareness believes it orchestrated the process but clearly this is an illusion.
In the second, your brain definitely felt that it played a significant part in the play but preemptive neural firings probably played the larger part in the cookie’s demise.
And, finally, in the last story, it is clear that the bus schedule is only going to get worked out by your agency considering, investigating and understanding the problem. And then deciding on a solution. Where is there any room on all of this for preemptive neural firings to help?
We humans like to think things are ‘this way or that’. We favor a simple ‘either-or’ constructions.
But reality isn’t necessarily like that. In fact reality is under no obligations to make itself simple enough for us to understand it.
Reality tends to favor a ‘both/and’ approach where things are all moving together in an incomprehensibly complex dance.
Agency has been with us in a slowly morphing form from the very first self-replicating molecules until we held the bus schedule in our hand.
And when self-awareness finally dawned for us, agency was finally able to see itself.
The issue of preemptive neural firings has come up a lot when folks talk about agency. If we can see preemptive neural firings then agency is not really happening, they say.
Well, this assumes that we are just self-aware beings. But we are much more than that.
We are everything that happened in the three stories – not just the self-aware being that dominates the last story.
It was said that “self-awareness may be the most powerful (and problematic) evolutionary adaptation that has ever occurred.” This was referring to a huge blind spot in us.
The aware mind and the self-aware mind are simply newer adaptations layered atop all that went before. They are not replacements.