Some thoughts on Agency, initially stemming from this lecture by Time Bayne on the phenomenology of agency.
One idea they explore is whether an action performed without the experience of Authorship is an action at all, or an event. He purposes that an experience of agency requires a conscious, causal connection between Intention and Event.
I’ll need to rewatch to find the paper he references, but the paper suggests a number of essential qualities of Agency:
- It is Recessive. Parts of it recede to the periphery of experience as intentionality shifts, just as the edges of vision “fade” from view as you focus. This is experienced as a spectrum of low agency but intentional events, such as tapping one’s foot, as opposed to incredibly deliberate high-agency events.
- It is “Transparent”, I’ll need clarification on this point
- Further clarifies the need for a clear causal connection between intentionality and event
They raise some interesting questions about the nature of agency as it relates to cognitive events. The original author describes events in terms of physical motion, but what of Cognitive Phenomenology and mental gestures? Can thoughts themselves be actions, and are they something we have some degree of agency over? Do we ourselves exist as exterior, agentic entities acting on our mental states with intention - or, is our experience of agency or “will” an emergent and illusory quality of preexisting metal states.