AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
"Humanity didn't invent art, art invented humanity" – Line from JFM book (which I have yet to read). OK, it's a kind of agential refactoring but what are the consequences?
There's an unproblematic naturalist interpretation, which is that art was and is a technology that allowed us to be self-conscious new ways, and all that is truly human is bootstrapped on top of this capability. That sounds perfectly sensible, but it's different from saying that art is an agent that pre-existed and molded humanity in its image, which is intriguing but harder to believe in.e
A part of the mind or brain. A Minsky agent, basically. I'm not sure my word is good but "agent" has its own problems (and Minsky himself gave it up for the very un-animistic "resources"). The end product of agential refactoring. An actor in the internal theater of the mind.
That is a really interesting agential refactoring. Humanity as not just an agent, but a self-transforming, self-creating agent (need a term for that – autopoetic? Too hard to spell and too technical-obscure).
book by Richard Dawkins and a well-known example of agential refactoring. What the title means is not that genes are selfish in a moral sense, we can't judge them, they are SELFish in the sense of being the real units of natural selection, that is, they are effectively agential.
But I still think The Selfish Gene is a sort of foundational document for whatever it is I am trying to do here. It's an important and well-known example of agential refactoring. Also a cornerstone of weird naturalism.
A different mode of agential refactoring. Pretty sure I picked up this term from either Ribbonfarm or the Rationalism community, but Google isn't showing me good prior art right now.