Chapter 1: Defining Agency

What differentiates agency in the context of consciousness, particularly within the enactivist framework? The criteria for agency should be observable in living, conscious beings while remaining abstract enough to encompass any scenario where decisions lead to actions. In essence, agency can be defined as the capacity for action driven by an animus, which represents the force behind the transformations initiated by living entities.

In a more philosophical sense, agency is a skill that individuals can cultivate. For complex agents like humans, agency exists on a spectrum; individuals such as prisoners, children, and slaves represent one end, while fully capable adults who adeptly navigate their societies represent the other. This spectrum thins out to include only those exceptional decision-makers who possess the greatest agency.

To illustrate, agency begins with a simple impulse in a single cell and scales up to the complex collaboration of approximately thirty-seven trillion cells in the human body. These cells work together, often sacrificing a degree of individual autonomy for the collective good, serving larger goals that the collective intellect can grasp. Some individuals possess the capacity to consider goals relevant to vast populations, further expanding the definitions of agency, life, consciousness, and intelligence across varying scales.

Emerging theories about the interplay between agency and consciousness are just beginning to take form, allowing room for new ideas. Given that enactivism serves as a foundational assumption for agentic behavior within cognitive frameworks, we can explore several concepts that align with the validity of this perspective.

The concept of self-justification, also known as Gödel-completeness in this context, refers to the ability to effect change within a system that encompasses the agent. For example, when a bacterium navigates toward sugar or a dog pants, self-justification is at play. This is the basis from which spontaneous actions arise, where the action of cells leads to observable changes in the environment.

However, challenges arise with this perspective, including the risk of attributing consciousness to non-sentient entities, the need for clarity in terminology, and the complexity involved in understanding the concept at a lay level. In this self-justification view, observable behavior serves as the foundation for consciousness, whereas the goal-directed perspective prioritizes explaining the emergence of intelligence.

If we seek a singular characteristic to distinguish consciousness from non-consciousness, the self-justification hypothesis appears to be the more robust of the two. In typical situations, environments exhibit a high degree of predictability, allowing for some level of behavioral forecasting — a fundamental principle that makes games like pool engaging. If billiard balls could choose their paths rather than following the players' intentions, the game would drastically change.

Thus, it might be beneficial to synthesize both viewpoints: billiard balls lack self-justification, a quality inherent in living beings. Over time, as patterns emerge, goals become identifiable to the extent that living systems can self-organize for survival and reproduction, contrasting with inert materials like rocks and metals.

The first video, "Agent Centered Deontology (Intent and Action Based Theories)," delves into the philosophical underpinnings of agency, exploring how actions and intentions shape our moral frameworks.

Chapter 2: Care Ethics and Enactivism

The connection between care and intelligence is well-established in contemporary discourse, spanning from existentialist thought to the works of scholars like Robert Pirsig and Michael Levin. Levin posits that care is intricately linked to intelligence, suggesting that both Worldview Ethics and care ethics can coexist within an enactivist framework. My interest has long been in the relationship between care and attention.

In my work "Formal Dialectics" (Daniel, 2023), I propose that observation follows sensation because sensation does not always coincide with attention. However, when it does, it can foster robust memories and emotional attachments. This enactive base allows agents to cultivate care for their surroundings, a notion supported by a wealth of literature. In the future, it may be possible to develop a framework for measuring varying levels of consciousness, intelligence, care, and agency.

For Levin, an organism's goals dictate its cares, with the complexity of those goals reflecting its intelligence. These goals serve as the basis for the organism's motivations, which may or may not reach consciousness in advanced beings.

While the term "agents" may better encapsulate the essence of consciousness, it remains challenging to dissociate the fundamental unit of consciousness from that of life and intelligence. This intricate line of thought is worth pursuing; if we can untangle it, we might construct a cybernetic framework for ethical reasoning, bringing us closer to a complete understanding of Worldview Ethics.

Care does not need to be a conscious process to manifest in actions, and there appears to be overlap between this idea and Gödel-completeness, first introduced in Essay 3. As we explore these inquiries, we enhance our understanding of the philosophical challenges at the forefront of contemporary thought.

The second video, "What is Agent Centered Virtue Ethics?" provides insights into how virtues and character traits influence ethical decision-making from an agent-centered perspective.

Chapter 3: Pleasure and Pain as Foundations of Experience

Our lived experience of the world is what ultimately matters. This experience is complex and transcends language, making it impossible for linguistic representations to fully capture it. Most of our interactions with the world don't require verbalization, but we still need to comprehend our environment to feel secure in our identities. While conscious thought remains internal, our surroundings significantly shape our cognitive processes.

Environmental factors are primary sources of awareness. While we can alter our surroundings, our histories remain unchanged. We can express a fraction of our experiences through conversation, and enhance our communication with music. Yet, despite our attempts to create a universally understood language, we inevitably fall short.

Pain arises when our desires go unmet. Although still not fully understood, pain is driven primarily by the brain's dopaminergic circuits and the nociceptive systems throughout the body. Anyone who has faced disappointment can attest to the discomfort of reward prediction errors within the brain—an unpleasant experience.

Physical pain, such as a skinned knee, results from damage to blood vessels, triggering a complex cascade of biological responses. The hormone endothelin-1, released by endothelial cells, binds to nerve receptors, creating a signal that the brain interprets as pain.

In mental pain, the neurons in the dopaminergic pathway react to unfavorable outcomes by downregulating their metabolic activity. If new pathways for resource allocation fail to emerge, this downregulation might become chronic, potentially leading to conditions like depression. Eventually, the system adapts, alleviating depressive symptoms, yet the cognitive anguish tied to these experiences has historically been difficult to articulate.

The complexities deepen as we scrutinize pain; not all forms fit neatly into established categories, and exceptions to neurological patterns are well-documented. However, a compelling mechanical-reductive perspective is emerging, connecting fundamental human experiences to observable phenomena in neuroscience, a field that has advanced rapidly since the mid-nineteenth century.

Ancient philosophers often discussed pleasure and pain as the primary motivators for human behavior. Modern neuroscience suggests both occur in the brain, with accurate mental models leading to pleasure and inaccuracies resulting in pain, regardless of physical harm.

Hermann von Helmholtz's concept of a "prediction machine" posits that the brain constructs situational models to guide understanding. Psycholinguists utilize this idea to explain how readers form mental representations of abstract concepts. Worldview Ethics suggests a similar model of consciousness—a self-referential mapping of beliefs into predictive frameworks.

Chapter 4: Care and Cognition

In cognitive neuroscience, Antonio Damasio's "Somatic Marker Hypothesis" revolutionized our understanding of emotion's role in reasoning. Released in the mid-90s, "Descartes' Error" quickly became a cornerstone of cognitive science education. The hypothesis asserts that feelings are integral to rational thought—after all, we have all experienced days when fatigue hampers focus!

Metabolism is crucial for cognition, and if we follow the Metabolic Theory of Consciousness to its logical conclusion, we may uncover a cognitive computation framework distinct from our current analog, digital, or quantum models. Metabolism gave rise to language and agency; thus, it is worth questioning whether these processes could be realized through a digital framework.

Levin acknowledges this critique while seeking to maintain an abstract understanding of care, ensuring it does not preclude the possibility of discovering non-traditional life forms that exhibit cognition or consciousness. This admirable stance allows the Metabolic Theory of Consciousness to coexist with alternative theories, fostering interdisciplinary advancements.

Chapter 5: The Role of Attention in Decision-Making

Attentional guidance is vital for conscious thought, blending endogenous and exogenous influences to direct our focus. Distractions can arise from external stimuli—like notifications or reminders—interfering with our current tasks. However, we often return to our previous focus without significant detriment.

Endogenous attentional guidance is largely influenced by the prefrontal cortex, while exogenous guidance is connected to the limbic system. Although much can be said about this interplay, further exploration will be necessary.

A critical initiative involves developing a taxonomy of decision-making processes. Given the multitude of variables influencing decisions, a comprehensive framework could provide valuable insights into cognitive behavior. The forthcoming Worldview Ethics book should incorporate some degree of taxonomical analysis, encouraging readers to share their experiences and insights.

Environmental feedback is a driving force behind cognitive behavior. While human behavior remains complex, scientific evidence supports the assertion that cognitive processes in conscious beings are closely tied to how they process environmental feedback. Notable scholars like Melanie Mitchell, Michael Levin, Antonio Damasio, Gualtiero Piccinini, and Ines Hipolito likely concur on this point, but we must maintain a critical outlook.

If the principle that "environmental feedback yields cognitive behavior in conscious organisms" holds true across all observable scenarios, we may establish a foundational tenet within the new interdisciplinary realm that Levin and others are pioneering. The aim of Worldview Ethics is to bridge cognitive neuroscience with ancient metaphysics, revisiting the foundations of ethical thought through the lens of contemporary discoveries.

Chapter 6: Enactive Agents as Dynamic Processes

Having explored the question of "What are enactive agents?" we can return to this central concept and propose a tentative definition. Enactive agents are ongoing, complex, and unique processes that leverage abstract representation, analog computation, and near-real-time decision-making, resulting in emergent behaviors in solitary or collective living organisms.

This perspective allows for flexibility; an enactive agent exists within an environment-individual complex, possessing a body that facilitates self-justified or goal-directed actions within a broader ecological system. Highly advanced environmental-individual complexes can evolve from collective units.

At every scale, the occurrences within enactive systems should be viewed as dynamic processes rather than static conditions. Importantly, no two states within an enactive system can ever be identical. These systems can evolve in complexity, but the passage of time is irreversible, and previous states cannot be replicated. Even the simplest organisms are subject to environmental change.

References

Damasio, A. R. (1994). Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York, NY: G.P. Putnam's Sons.

Jarow, Oshan. (2022). "Scaling Selfhood," In Musing Mind. [Audio podcast episode]. Retrieved from