I wish to examine a point in the foundations of your post—to be more precise, a point which leads to the inevitable conclusion that it is not problematic in this discussion to use the term ‘agent’ while it is understood in a manner which allows a thermostat to qualify as an agent.
A thermostat certainly has triggers/sensors which force a reaction when a condition has been met. However to argue that this is akin to how a person is an agent is to argue that a rock supposedly “runs” the program known as gravity, when it falls. The issue is not a lack of parallels; it is a lack of undercurrent below the parallels (in a sense, this is causing the view that a thermostat is an agent, to be a ‘leaking abstraction’ as you put it). For we have to consider that no actual identification of change (be it through sense or thought or both) is possible when the entity identifying such change lacks the ability to translate it in a setting of its own. By translating I mean something readily evident in the case of human agents—not so evident in the case of ants or other relatively simpler creatures. If your room is on fire you identify this as a change from the normal, but this does not mean there is only one way to identify the changed situation. Someone living next to you will also identify that there is a fire, but chances are the (to use an analogy) code for that in their mind will differ very significantly from your own. Yet on some basic level you will be in agreement that there was a fire, and you had to leave.
Now an ant, another being which has life—unlike a thermostat—picks up changes in its environment. If you try to attack it it may go into panic mode. This, again, does not mean the act of attacking the ant is picked up as it is; it is once against translated, this time by the ant. How it translates it is not known, however it seems impossible to argue that it merely picks up the change as something set, some block of truth with the meaning ‘change/danger’ etc. It picks it up due to its ability (not conscious in the case of the ant) to identify something as set, and something as a change in that original set. A thermostat has no identification of anything set, because not being alive it has no power nor need to sense a starting condition, let alone to have inside it a vortex where translations of changes are formed.
All the above is why I firmly am against the view that “agent” is to be defined in a way that both a human and a thermostat can partake in it, when the discussion is about humans and involves that term.
I wish to examine a point in the foundations of your post—to be more precise, a point which leads to the inevitable conclusion that it is not problematic in this discussion to use the term ‘agent’ while it is understood in a manner which allows a thermostat to qualify as an agent.
A thermostat certainly has triggers/sensors which force a reaction when a condition has been met. However to argue that this is akin to how a person is an agent is to argue that a rock supposedly “runs” the program known as gravity, when it falls. The issue is not a lack of parallels; it is a lack of undercurrent below the parallels (in a sense, this is causing the view that a thermostat is an agent, to be a ‘leaking abstraction’ as you put it). For we have to consider that no actual identification of change (be it through sense or thought or both) is possible when the entity identifying such change lacks the ability to translate it in a setting of its own. By translating I mean something readily evident in the case of human agents—not so evident in the case of ants or other relatively simpler creatures. If your room is on fire you identify this as a change from the normal, but this does not mean there is only one way to identify the changed situation. Someone living next to you will also identify that there is a fire, but chances are the (to use an analogy) code for that in their mind will differ very significantly from your own. Yet on some basic level you will be in agreement that there was a fire, and you had to leave.
Now an ant, another being which has life—unlike a thermostat—picks up changes in its environment. If you try to attack it it may go into panic mode. This, again, does not mean the act of attacking the ant is picked up as it is; it is once against translated, this time by the ant. How it translates it is not known, however it seems impossible to argue that it merely picks up the change as something set, some block of truth with the meaning ‘change/danger’ etc. It picks it up due to its ability (not conscious in the case of the ant) to identify something as set, and something as a change in that original set. A thermostat has no identification of anything set, because not being alive it has no power nor need to sense a starting condition, let alone to have inside it a vortex where translations of changes are formed.
All the above is why I firmly am against the view that “agent” is to be defined in a way that both a human and a thermostat can partake in it, when the discussion is about humans and involves that term.
What do you think of the following taxonomy?:
Inactive: Rocks (in isolation*)
Reactive/Reaction Circuits: Thermostat
Decisive/Active/Agents/Conscious: Humans
*A circuit can be made out of dominos.