Re: "The Evolution of Agency" by Michael Tomasello

John Harshman wrote:

On 4/5/24 2:13 PM, Arkalen wrote:

On 05/04/2024 16:02, John Harshman wrote:

On 4/5/24 4:13 AM, Arkalen wrote:

Hello all,
>
Has anyone here read "The Evolution of Agency" by Michael Tomasello ?

 

Maybe really short to start with:
 Tomasello defines "agency" as a kind of goal-seeking system: a system that has a goal, is capable of perceiving the environment, verifying whether the goal is met, if not deploying a behavior that would move the goal forward, and looping between verification/behavior until the goal is met. Analogy is a robot lawnmower.
  He argues that animal evolution has seen progressive complexification of agency that basically involves adding layers, with higher ones monitoring/controlling the lower ones. He focuses on the history of human evolution specifically and takes some example organisms from lineages that presumably match the level of agency a human ancestor would have had (he acknowledges convergent evolution of various levels of agency in other lineages but leaves it at that).
 The levels he describes are:
 * no agency - nematodes. There isn't goal-seeking, just stimulus-response. The animal eats food if it runs into it, escapes danger if it's present etc but doesn't really *plan* or anticipate beyond its immediate environment

 . . .

* first level of agency - early vertebrates. Basic goal-seeking: a lizard will have distinct goals at any given time (seeking food,

 . . .

* second level - early mammals. They have a second layer of goal-seeking feedback-loop system that pilots the first in order to not just achieve

  . . .
  

* fourth level - humans. Tomasello argues that the human "secret sauce" is essentially collective agency - reasoning agents like great apes that

 more snipping

Thanks for that. Sounds interesting. My greatest immediate apprehension is that it would take a truly huge amount of experimental and observational evidence to test the various aspects of the scenario, and I wonder how much of it has already been done.

Seems to me that it's very anthropocentrically biased.
The suggestion that nemotodes don't have goals as described is odd.
They seek food, seek mating. Hell, bacteria have goal seeking behavior in terms of seeking food,
or fleeing toxins via chemotaxis. Just because we understand some
of these things in terms of simpler biochemistry means what?
We can induce mating behavior in sea slugs with peptide hormones,
or they can induce those hormones themselves through other pathways.
It seems an attempt to over-emphasize the use of central nervous system control which downgrounds gut level control or other physiological
control schemes as inferior. But why? Again, smells anthropocentric.
We can recall that many significant neuropeptide hormones stem from
what were first gut peptide hormones. Is there some innate advantage
across all life to relocating control systems? Sure, it's worked out well for those who currently have done so, but
it seems to be working well in those creatures who haven't. It would be curious to simply test these ideas with observations
of ants. A botanist who studies complex communities might also
have some interesting commentary.