The concept of scaffolded agent seems interesting to explore. Some thoughts:
1. This might be obvious from what you wrote and I’m missing it, but I would write the TL;DR as “A scaffolded reproductor contains (reproductive) information and uses external (reproductive) machinery; can we think of goal-y information using external goal-y machinery?”.
2. With this TL;DR, it seems clear, as you yourself note, that the human using a hammer is not a good example, because the hammer isn’t really goal-y machinery.
3. I also think that the final paragraph points at a different phenomenon: a decomposition of one agent into its goals and its internal goal-y machinery. This seems analogous to decomposing a human into DNA and ribosomes, and not similar to how a virus kidnaps those ribosomes so they are used with new information.
4. Some potentially better examples that I could think of:
a) A human boarding a ship, if we consider the ship as an agent acting in the universe to reach its goals. The human has a goal (which happens to be the same destination), and enters the “agency machinery” of the ship.
b) A better variation of this could be a human hitchhiking several rides to get to a destination. In this case, their goal doesn’t coincide with any of the external agents’ goals, so their goal gets fulfilled by many external goals being fulfilled, which might be closer to how a virus gets reproduced in addition to the normal reproduction of the host.
c) A different example of scaffolded agency could be a BookCrossing book. The book has the goal of being read and shared and tracked. Unlike the previous example, this goal isn’t just a linear combination of external goals; it’s something new.
5. Thinking about the last example makes me think: Could scaffolded agency be just… Dennett’s design stance? Or more specifically, an affordance? Isn’t a door-handle a scaffolded agent, waiting for external agency machinery to fulfill its goal of opening the door? If the answer is no, I think that we need to be looking for something that looks like an affordance, but doesn’t have a designer, possibly something like the way a banana perfectly fits in a human hand?
The concept of scaffolded agent seems interesting to explore. Some thoughts:
1. This might be obvious from what you wrote and I’m missing it, but I would write the TL;DR as “A scaffolded reproductor contains (reproductive) information and uses external (reproductive) machinery; can we think of goal-y information using external goal-y machinery?”.
2. With this TL;DR, it seems clear, as you yourself note, that the human using a hammer is not a good example, because the hammer isn’t really goal-y machinery.
3. I also think that the final paragraph points at a different phenomenon: a decomposition of one agent into its goals and its internal goal-y machinery. This seems analogous to decomposing a human into DNA and ribosomes, and not similar to how a virus kidnaps those ribosomes so they are used with new information.
4. Some potentially better examples that I could think of:
a) A human boarding a ship, if we consider the ship as an agent acting in the universe to reach its goals. The human has a goal (which happens to be the same destination), and enters the “agency machinery” of the ship.
b) A better variation of this could be a human hitchhiking several rides to get to a destination. In this case, their goal doesn’t coincide with any of the external agents’ goals, so their goal gets fulfilled by many external goals being fulfilled, which might be closer to how a virus gets reproduced in addition to the normal reproduction of the host.
c) A different example of scaffolded agency could be a BookCrossing book. The book has the goal of being read and shared and tracked. Unlike the previous example, this goal isn’t just a linear combination of external goals; it’s something new.
5. Thinking about the last example makes me think: Could scaffolded agency be just… Dennett’s design stance? Or more specifically, an affordance? Isn’t a door-handle a scaffolded agent, waiting for external agency machinery to fulfill its goal of opening the door? If the answer is no, I think that we need to be looking for something that looks like an affordance, but doesn’t have a designer, possibly something like the way a banana perfectly fits in a human hand?