Hypothesis: agency violating phenomena should be thought of as edge-cases which show that our abstractions of ourselves as agents are leaky.
For instance, look at addictive substances like heroin. These substances break down our Cartesian boundary (our intuitive seperation of the world into ourselves and the environment with a boundary) by chemically assaulting the reward mechanisms in our brain.
However, video games or ads don’t obviously violate our Cartesian boundary, which may be one of many boundaries we assume exist. Which, if my hypothesis is true, suggests that you could try to find other boundaries/abstractions violated by those phenomena. Other things which “hack” humans, like politics or psyops, would violate boundaries as well.
Finding the relevant abstractions and seeing how they break would increase our understanding of ourselves as agents. This could help triangulate a more general definition of agency for which these other boundaries are special cases or approximations.
This seems like a hard problem. But just building a taxonomy for our known abstractions for agency is less useful but much more feasible for a few months work. Sounds like a good research project.
Hypothesis: agency violating phenomena should be thought of as edge-cases which show that our abstractions of ourselves as agents are leaky.
For instance, look at addictive substances like heroin. These substances break down our Cartesian boundary (our intuitive seperation of the world into ourselves and the environment with a boundary) by chemically assaulting the reward mechanisms in our brain.
However, video games or ads don’t obviously violate our Cartesian boundary, which may be one of many boundaries we assume exist. Which, if my hypothesis is true, suggests that you could try to find other boundaries/abstractions violated by those phenomena. Other things which “hack” humans, like politics or psyops, would violate boundaries as well.
Finding the relevant abstractions and seeing how they break would increase our understanding of ourselves as agents. This could help triangulate a more general definition of agency for which these other boundaries are special cases or approximations.
This seems like a hard problem. But just building a taxonomy for our known abstractions for agency is less useful but much more feasible for a few months work. Sounds like a good research project.