Re: "The Evolution of Agency" by Michael Tomasello

On 06/04/2024 16:51, Richmond wrote:

Arkalen <arkalen@proton.me> writes:
 

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.

 If we substitute the ultimate goal, which is to survive, instead of
various means to an end type goals, then agency becomes life. But...
 

>
>
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

 The robot lawnmower doesn't plan either. Although some planning went
into making it no doubt. I think the animal does have a goal here, which
is to survive, and behaviours like eating and avoiding are a means to
that goal.

Yes, "plan" was bad word choice on my part because by Tomasello's own classification "planning" would be a level 2 type of agency at least, and he wouldn't describe lizards (the exemplar for "goal-directed agents") as doing it either. I don't have a single-word alternative though. Maybe I could have said "doesn't flexibly direct/inhibit its behaviors to meet specific goals that change over time".

 Some animals have not progressed to more complexity. In fact I don't
think it is necessarily progress, it depends on whether it achieves the
goal. There are still bacteria for example, doing quite well without the
complexity of the human brain.
 

It is a rather annoying feature of discussing the evolutionary history of any highly derived trait (and ten times worse when the trait is highly derived *in humans*), that it will necessarily involve going through the history of a lineage with that trait looking at how it progressively got more derived in that lineage. And if any version of that trait can be found in extant organisms, those organisms will be used as illustrative examples.
This *looks* like framing evolution as an inherent progression along this trait with organisms that have a less-derived versions seeming "less evolved". But it's not. I mean, it *can* be, but a person who fully believes that evolution isn't about universal progression, that every modern animal is equally evolved, that no extant adaptation is better than another because the fact they exist means they promote the survival of the species they're in and that's the only standard for "goodness" that's relevant to evolution... will still, in the specific context of discussing the historical evolution of some highly-derived trait, end up discussing it in these terms. All they can do is add caveats to make it clear what it is they're doing. Tomasello does.