Fragments to Agents: Agency From Plants to Animals to Brains

Taking a break from our newest series "Fire, Cells, and Circuits", we return to our other core series "Fragments to Agents".

When we speak of “agency,” we usually imagine animals, movement, nervous systems, maybe even human intention. But is agency limited to creatures with brains? Or does it emerge more deeply in the biological world?

In this discussion, we’ll explore how both plants and animals regulate themselves, adapt to their environments, and pursue normatively significant states like survival, growth, and reproduction. We’ll ask:

• What distinguishes mere chemical reactivity from biological agency?
• Do plants exhibit meaningful forms of agency without nervous systems?
• How does animal sensorimotor organization build on more basic metabolic autonomy?
• Where does regulation become underdetermined by lower-level processes?
• What might this tell us about cognition, intelligence, and even AI?

Drawing from work in theoretical biology, network theory, systems theory, complexity, and philosophy of biology, we’ll examine how agency may arise from self-maintaining, autonomous systems and how increasingly decoupled regulatory layers expand what organisms can do.

Agency may not begin with brains but with networks of processes that regulate themselves across scales.

This will be a presentation divided into sections, with opportunities for discussion interleaved throughout and ample time for larger open discussions following the presentation. Expect conceptual framing, examples from plant and animal life, and space to collectively refine what we mean when we talk about “acting” in the natural world.

As always, we welcome new folks to the series or to the group to join. Just be ready to listen, ask good questions, and deepen your thinking about what it means to have agency in the natural world from a grounded, non-supernatural perspective.