I’ll develop my thoughts about not being able to sensibly apply the description ‘agenty’ to the creator because wondering why agency should be a key question is what originally motivated my above comment.
You can search ‘agenty’ and find many comments on this page that discuss whether we should speculate that the creator has agency. I found myself wondering throughout these comments what is specifically being meant by this. If the creator is ‘agenty’, what properties must it have and are those properties necessarily interesting?
I could probably look around and find a definition I would like better, but my definition of ‘agenty’ when I first start thinking about it is that this has meaning in a specifically human context.
Broadly, something ‘agenty’ is something that makes decisions according to a complex decision tree algorithm. This is a human-context-specific definition because “complex” means relative to what we consider complex. A mammal makes complex decisions and thus is ‘agenty’ while a simple process like water makes simple decisions (described by a small number of equations and the properties of the immediate physical space) and is not agenty. A complex inanimate thing (like ‘evolution’) and a simple animate thing (like a virus) would give us pause, straining our immediate, concrete conception of agency.
I’m willing to say that evolution has agency (it has goals—long term stable solutions—and complicated ways of achieving these goals) and water has simple agency. This because in my opinion what was really meant when we made the agency dichotomy between humans and water is that humans have free will and water doesn’t. But finally with a deterministic world view, this distinction dissolves. Humans have as much agency as anything else, but our decision algorithm is very complex to us, whereas we can often reliably predict what water will do.
Then to apply this concept of agency to the mechanism of creation of the universe… All the rules and steady states of the universe could be interpreted as its ‘intentions’ and, as such, it would have very complex agency. Another person may have a different set of meanings that they associate with agency, intention, etc., and consider this a terrible anthropomorphism if my words were mapped to their meanings. However, I don’t think it reflects an actual difference in beliefs about the territory.
If someone reading this has a different ontology, what would you specifically mean by the creator having agency, if it did?
I’ll develop my thoughts about not being able to sensibly apply the description ‘agenty’ to the creator because wondering why agency should be a key question is what originally motivated my above comment.
You can search ‘agenty’ and find many comments on this page that discuss whether we should speculate that the creator has agency. I found myself wondering throughout these comments what is specifically being meant by this. If the creator is ‘agenty’, what properties must it have and are those properties necessarily interesting?
I could probably look around and find a definition I would like better, but my definition of ‘agenty’ when I first start thinking about it is that this has meaning in a specifically human context.
Broadly, something ‘agenty’ is something that makes decisions according to a complex decision tree algorithm. This is a human-context-specific definition because “complex” means relative to what we consider complex. A mammal makes complex decisions and thus is ‘agenty’ while a simple process like water makes simple decisions (described by a small number of equations and the properties of the immediate physical space) and is not agenty. A complex inanimate thing (like ‘evolution’) and a simple animate thing (like a virus) would give us pause, straining our immediate, concrete conception of agency.
I’m willing to say that evolution has agency (it has goals—long term stable solutions—and complicated ways of achieving these goals) and water has simple agency. This because in my opinion what was really meant when we made the agency dichotomy between humans and water is that humans have free will and water doesn’t. But finally with a deterministic world view, this distinction dissolves. Humans have as much agency as anything else, but our decision algorithm is very complex to us, whereas we can often reliably predict what water will do.
Then to apply this concept of agency to the mechanism of creation of the universe… All the rules and steady states of the universe could be interpreted as its ‘intentions’ and, as such, it would have very complex agency. Another person may have a different set of meanings that they associate with agency, intention, etc., and consider this a terrible anthropomorphism if my words were mapped to their meanings. However, I don’t think it reflects an actual difference in beliefs about the territory.
If someone reading this has a different ontology, what would you specifically mean by the creator having agency, if it did?