Not a reductionist materialist perspective perse, but one idea I find plausible is that ‘agent’ makes sense as a necessary separate descriptor and a different mode of analysis precisely because of the loopiness you get when you think about thinking, a property that makes talking about agents fundamentally different from talking about rocks or hammers, the Odyssey, or any other ‘thing’ that could in principle be described on the single level of ‘material reality’ if we wanted to
When I try to understand the material universe and its physical properties, the object-level mode of analysis functions as we’ve come to expect from science—I can make observations and discover patterns, make predictions and hypothesize universal laws.
But what happens when that thing which does the hypothesizing encounters another thing that does the same? To comprehend is to be able to predict and control, therefore in this encounter for one agent to successfully describe the other as object is to reduce its agent properties relative to this first agent (think: a superintelligence that can model you flawlessly, and to which you are just another lever to be pushed).
Any agent can, in principle, be described as an object. But at the same time there must always be at least one agent which can not be described as object from any perspective, the one that can describe all others. Insofar as it can describe itself as object, this very capacity is its mastery over itself, its ability to transcend the very limitations it can describe on the object level.
This is similar to how you still need to ascribe the ability to ‘think about the world’ to materialist reductionist philosophers for the philosophy to be comprehensible—if their acts are themselves understood solely as material phenomena, you’re left with nothing. Even materialist metaphysics can’t function without a subject.
Which is to say, I agree with your assessment. Saying “really, only the material-level is real” is a self-defeating position, and when we do talk about agents we always have to do so from a perspective. For the superintelligence I am merely material, whereas two humans can appear/present themselves as free, self-determining agents to each other.
But I think there has to be another definition having to do with the capacity to reflect. A human is still an agent in-itself, though not for-itself, even if they’re currently being totally manipulated by an AI—they retain their capacity for engaging in agent-like operations, while a rock won’t qualify as a subject no matter how little we interfere with its development.
Not a reductionist materialist perspective perse, but one idea I find plausible is that ‘agent’ makes sense as a necessary separate descriptor and a different mode of analysis precisely because of the loopiness you get when you think about thinking, a property that makes talking about agents fundamentally different from talking about rocks or hammers, the Odyssey, or any other ‘thing’ that could in principle be described on the single level of ‘material reality’ if we wanted to
When I try to understand the material universe and its physical properties, the object-level mode of analysis functions as we’ve come to expect from science—I can make observations and discover patterns, make predictions and hypothesize universal laws. But what happens when that thing which does the hypothesizing encounters another thing that does the same? To comprehend is to be able to predict and control, therefore in this encounter for one agent to successfully describe the other as object is to reduce its agent properties relative to this first agent (think: a superintelligence that can model you flawlessly, and to which you are just another lever to be pushed).
Any agent can, in principle, be described as an object. But at the same time there must always be at least one agent which can not be described as object from any perspective, the one that can describe all others. Insofar as it can describe itself as object, this very capacity is its mastery over itself, its ability to transcend the very limitations it can describe on the object level. This is similar to how you still need to ascribe the ability to ‘think about the world’ to materialist reductionist philosophers for the philosophy to be comprehensible—if their acts are themselves understood solely as material phenomena, you’re left with nothing. Even materialist metaphysics can’t function without a subject.
Which is to say, I agree with your assessment. Saying “really, only the material-level is real” is a self-defeating position, and when we do talk about agents we always have to do so from a perspective. For the superintelligence I am merely material, whereas two humans can appear/present themselves as free, self-determining agents to each other. But I think there has to be another definition having to do with the capacity to reflect. A human is still an agent in-itself, though not for-itself, even if they’re currently being totally manipulated by an AI—they retain their capacity for engaging in agent-like operations, while a rock won’t qualify as a subject no matter how little we interfere with its development.