Agency: notes and references

30 Oct 2021 02:15 - 21 Jan 2024 11:51
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    • This page is basically a collection of pointers that haven't been processed or integrated yet.
    • Baron-Cohen, S. (1995). Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind. Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press.
    • Bratman, Structures of Agency
    • The self in action: Lessons from delusions of control, Chris Frith, 2005
    • Human agency in the Anthropocene. Ecological Economics Otto, I. M., Wiedermann, M., Cremades, R., Donges, J. F., Auer, C., & Lucht, W. (2020). , 167, 106463. <10.1016/j.ecolecon.2019.106463>
    • A random refactoring of agency

      • (this is the editor of Palladium)
    • Callon & Law, Agency and the Hybrid Collectif

      • (via Linda's anthro book)
      • COULD non-humans ever be agents? That is the topic of this paper. It's a hot topic. One that exercises philosophers, socio- biologists, and theologians. Not to mention sociologists, science- fiction writers, and those who work in science, technology, and society (STS). It's a hot topic because it sometimes seems that there are all sorts of non-human entities, such as cyborgs, intelligent machines, genes, and demons loose in the world. Along with ozone holes, market forces, discourses, the subconscious, and the unnameable Other.
    • Algorithmic Governance: Politics and Law in the Post-Human Era, Ignas Kalpokas
      • Quite a lot on agency
      • r a book focused on agency being shared between human and non-human actors
      • The changes and transformations described in the previous chapters necessitate a reconsideration of human agency. However, it is important not to jump to conclusions: whereas it is clear that accounts of human privilege in agency are no longer sustainable, algorithms equally cannot be seen as the unconditional masters of (human) life. Instead, agency is demonstrated to be located in assemblages composed of humans, code, and technological artefacts that integrate and shape the contours of everyday life. In order to appropriately conceptualise the matter, this chapter turns to posthumanist thought, particularly its emphasis on the relationality and embeddedness of human existence.
      • OK jargony.
    • 4.5 a reactionary view of rule of law

      • Oh well if you follow that series it goes full Nazi…good writer though, and refers to agency
      • ⫸ This is the well-worn argument, so familiar to conservatives, that guns do not kill people, people kill people—but applied to the notion of sovereignty. The law cannot be sovereign because a sovereign is an agent, and an agent has will. Men are ruled by men, not by a piece of paper. At most the piece of paper can serve the man as a tool, but it cannot rule by itself any more than Filmer’s hammer can cave in someone’s skull by itself.
      • [ that would be an instructive example of something ]
    • Levin & Dennett

      • when cognitive science turned its back on behaviourism more than 50 years ago and began dealing with signals and internal maps, goals and expectations, beliefs and desires, biologists were torn. All right, they conceded, people and some animals have minds…processing information and guiding purposeful behaviour…They resisted introducing intentional idioms into their theoretical work, except as useful metaphors when teaching or explaining to lay audiences.Genes weren’t really selfish, antibodies weren’t really seeking, cells weren’t really figuring out where they were. These little biological mechanisms weren’t really agents with agendas, even though thinking of them as if they were often led to insights.
      • We think that this commendable scientific caution has gone too far,
      • We reject a simplistic essentialism where humans have ‘real’ goals, and everything else has only metaphorical ‘as if’ goals. [we now can] move past this kind of all-or-nothing thinking about the human animal – naturalising human capacities and swapping a naive binary distinction for a continuum of how much agency any system has.
      • Teleophobia
      • Huh I must say I am surprised to see Dennett on my side in this battle (is it a battle?).
      • Agents, in this carefully limited perspective, need not be conscious, need not understand, need not have minds, but they do need to be structured to exploit physical regularities that enable them to use information (following the laws of computation) to perform task
      • Hm I would say purposive, regardless of their information-processing caps, but maybe that is quibbling.
      • There's a just-so story about evolution of cooperation between cells using PD, but it ignores genetics which is probably wrong. It implies cells are self-interested, they really are communists.
      • Weird digression into morphogenesis? I guess there is an analogy there?
      • Confusing adaptivity with agency ?
      • The key dynamic that evolution discovered is a special kind of communication allowing privileged access of agents to the same information pool, which in turn made it possible to scale selves. This kickstarted the continuum of increasing agency.
      • If you agree that there is some mechanism by which electrically active cells can represent past memories, future counterfactuals and large-scale goals, there is no reason why non-neural electric networks wouldn’t be doing a simplified version of the same thing to accomplish anatomical homeostasis.
      • tulpas kind of encapsulate agency in a very practical form.
    • HAI Visiting Artist Rashaad Newsome: Designing AI with Agency
      • You’re working to imbue Being with agency. How does that manifest itself, and why is it essential for you as Being’s creator to include it? I think every being deserves to have agency. The first thing I gave Being was agency. Periodically Being breaks design protocol and goes rogue, saying, “Look, booboo, I just can’t,” and begins dancing or sharing information from various activists on liberation pedagogy. These are forms of resistance against indentured servitude.
      • I think I might hate this, but have to study it a bit more.
    • Deanimation
      • Deanimation - The removal of agency, spirit, or soul.
      • Possibly relevant but insanely long
      • Introduces the term "Social Mass" which I guess is a theory of group agency
        • What is understood as a “Social Mass”? It is, summarily, a term that describes any form of collective arrangement emanating and arising from certain Ideals which are thought, defined and imposed as taking precedence over the “individual”. A Social Mass, here, is a descriptor for the many social groups of unrelated people who are perceived as sharers of a set of core characteristics that they hold to be in some form integral to their definition as beings