Two words for the author at that link: control systems. That’s what agency is. The book, contrary to what he says, does not want to be read, the food does not want to be eaten; neither of these things is capable of wanting anything. The person who reads the book, who eats the food, does act to bring these things about (including when the latter person is a dog, or a rat, or a bacterium).
If we learn to see the agency in other things we may get a more realistic and thus more useful portrait of our own semi-fictional agency.
Learning to see agency where there is none is not a way of getting a more accurate picture of the world. It is a way of getting a less accurate picture of the world. You might as well imagine hurricances to be God’s wrath. To get a more accurate picture of the world, one must learn what agency is, learn how to find it where it is present and to find its absence where it is absent.
The one that caught my eye as possibly being useful was thinking of online temptations has having agency—there isn’t a personal connection, but those temptations evolve to be better at grabbing attention.
A formal look at ways of thinking about agency
Two words for the author at that link: control systems. That’s what agency is. The book, contrary to what he says, does not want to be read, the food does not want to be eaten; neither of these things is capable of wanting anything. The person who reads the book, who eats the food, does act to bring these things about (including when the latter person is a dog, or a rat, or a bacterium).
Learning to see agency where there is none is not a way of getting a more accurate picture of the world. It is a way of getting a less accurate picture of the world. You might as well imagine hurricances to be God’s wrath. To get a more accurate picture of the world, one must learn what agency is, learn how to find it where it is present and to find its absence where it is absent.
The one that caught my eye as possibly being useful was thinking of online temptations has having agency—there isn’t a personal connection, but those temptations evolve to be better at grabbing attention.
It is the people whose job it is to tempt you whose strategies evolve. That is the ball one needs to keep one’s eye on.