When Agency Turns Against Itself: A Paradox of Intelligence and Self-Destruction
 
Credits: Based on a discussion between Peer and Claude Haiku 4.5
 
Have you ever wondered or discussed what "agency" actually means? I recently discovered a fascinating open access book called An Evolutionary Story of Agency: How Life Evolved to Act on its Own. This book examines how biological agency has evolved throughout life's history, exploring its origins, selective advantages, and increasing complexity across different species from bacteria to animals.

The paradox that really got me thinking is this: if biological agency evolved to help organisms thrive within their ecological systems, why do we - perhaps the most agential species ever - use that capacity to dismantle the very environment we depend on? To explore this head-scratcher, I fed the book to an LLM and we had a conversation about what the authors' framework of biological agency might tell us about human behaviour in our current predicament. What follows is what we worked through together.
 
Biological Agency
 
The authors of the book state that "biological agency is an adaptive interactive process performed by an individuated self-producing and reproducing system (an organism) that modifies its environment in ways that support its maintenance, either as an individual or as part of a specific lineage."

Key Characteristics of this definition
  • Adaptive interaction: Actions respond to environmental conditions and are flexible
  • Individuated system: The agent has clear organismic boundaries
  • Self-producing and reproducing: Self-maintenance and reproduction are essential
  • Environmental modification: The agent actively changes its surroundings
  • Functional outcome: Modifications support the agent's survival or lineage continuity
  • Circular relationship: The agent is both initiator and beneficiary of its own actions
  • Autonomy requirement: The agent sustains itself through its actions; failure means cessation
The authors emphasise that agency operates through action-detection loops: reversible processes continuously modulated by sensory feedback. This distinguishes it from constitutive processes (like growth or development), which are typically irreversible and form part of an organism's fundamental organisation rather than its interactive behaviour.
 
The Human Problem: Agency Gone Wrong
 
The book's definition focuses on agency as a biological capacity - the ability to act on one's environment in ways that support one's own maintenance and reproduction. By that definition, humans certainly have agency. The question is whether our contemporary environmental destructiveness represents agency well-exercised or agency misdirected.

The authors would likely argue it's the latter. Their framework suggests agency evolved to support an organism's survival within ecological systems. When human actions systematically undermine the conditions necessary for our own survival - degrading soil, water systems, climate stability, biodiversity - we are engaging in something paradoxical: we're using our agency against our own long-term interests.

A few observations:
  • Short-term vs. long-term maintenance: The definition specifies agency supports maintenance "either as an individual or as part of a specific lineage." Many human environmental destruction stems from prioritising immediate individual or generational benefit over lineage continuity. This is arguably a failure of agency, not its absence.
  • The complexity problem: Humans have developed such complex technological and economic systems that the feedback loops between our actions and their consequences have become obscured. We act without clear sensory detection of the damage - a breakdown of the action-detection loops the authors identify as essential to agency functioning well.
  • Collective agency confusion: Modern human activity often involves diffused responsibility across institutions, making it unclear who the "agent" actually is. This differs from simpler organisms where individual agency and outcome are clearly linked.
Conclusion
 
Rather than humans lacking agency, it is more accurate to say we are exercising it destructively or short-sightedly, which raises uncomfortable questions about whether intelligence necessarily improves our use of the capacity for purposeful action.
 
 
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