Re: "The Evolution of Agency" by Michael Tomasello

On 4/6/2024 12:44 PM, Arkalen wrote:

On 06/04/2024 16:15, RonO wrote:

On 4/5/2024 4:13 PM, Arkalen wrote:

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

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

Hello all,
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Has anyone here read "The Evolution of Agency" by Michael Tomasello ?
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I thought it was a really interesting (and very short) book that kind of blew my mind, and months later I can confirm it still impacts how I think about human consciousness and social living. I'm still not sure though how much of that is just being dazzled, or reading things for the first time that are actually already well-known, or if the book is plain wrong and if so on what.
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I'd toyed with the idea of doing a book report here, and still might if motivation arises, but I figured now it's been out long enough that someone else might actually have read it and have takes.
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I for one would be interested in a summary.
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Maybe really short to start with:
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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.
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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).
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The levels he describes are:
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* 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

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You have to go back to single celled microbes to have "no agency", and then it would be trying to define what you are talking about.

 Yes. Doing so is the book's point.
 

  If you want to define agency as something that requires a brain and that type of decision making, you can do that, but that is just an extension of what organisms were doing before they had brains.

 The book doesn't define agency as requiring brains, it defines it as a specific type of behavioral organization. It admittedly takes it so much for granted that this organization requires a brain that it doesn't even mention it (that I recall), but it's really not relevant to the book's argument.
 After all the book itself says the kinds of agency it discusses evolved convergently in different lineages. If we showed some brainless creature displays the kind of internal organization & resulting behavioral complexity characteristic of one of the kinds of agency defined in the book, the fact it doesn't have a brain wouldn't matter at all. If it had the kind of internal organization without the types of behavior Tomasello associates with them or vice-versa, that would indeed go against his thesis.
 

  Take a simple behavior undertaken by bacteria.  There is something called the SOS response.  A bacterium finds itself in an unfavorable environment, a physiological response is started that results in genetic mutations occurring faster than normal.  The bacterium does this because it obviously has worked to improve the individuals situation at a high enough frequency that the bacterial lineage survives as a population.
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Bacteria can use their flagellum to move to better environments, and they have sensors and decision making apparatus in terms of changing direction and moving towards that better environment.  Nematodes have a more sophisticated system to do the same thing.  Humans have an even more sophisticated system to do the same thing.  Chimps and humans have group agency, they can form hunting parties more sophisticated than wolf packs and lion prides, but wolf packs and lion prides still have less sophisticated group agency.  Have you watched Planet Earth on the BBC channel?  They show group agency among sea creatures.  Sea snakes and fish cooperate in order to be more successful in hunting prey.  They also show octopus and fish cooperating in order to hunt prey.  They show group agency among fur seals to trap fish, and they show dolphins and whales cooperating with each other to be more efficient predators.
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Agency just seems to have levels of being able to interact with the environment.  It is a general aspect of life because organisms that can do it have an obvious advantage.  Life has evolved more sophisticated means to interact with the environment, and it has resulted in what we call consciousness.
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Ron Okimoto

  Yes, and the book presents a specific classification of those levels, arguing it corresponds to specific kinds of internal organization that result in specific behavioral patterns. I can't really tell if you disagree with the book (or my summary of it at least) and think what you just wrote is a refutation of it, or if you agree with it but think what you just wrote is a better way of describing the system than the book's.

I disagreed with your statement that nematodes had no agency, and I outlined what the book needed to consider about how life works in terms of dealing with the environment we find ourselves in.
It sounds like the book understand this, and is dealing with forms cognition involved after lifeforms evolved nervous systems.  Nervous systems only allowed more sophisticated interactions with the environment.
Ron Okimoto

  Arkalen
 /snip