CFAR’s notion of agency is roughly “the opposite of sphexishness,” a concept named after the behavior of a particular kind of wasp:
Some Sphex wasps drop a paralyzed insect near the opening of the nest. Before taking provisions into the nest, the Sphex first inspects the nest, leaving the prey outside. During the inspection, an experimenter can move the prey a few inches away from the opening. When the Sphex emerges from the nest ready to drag in the prey, it finds the prey missing. The Sphex quickly locates the moved prey, but now its behavioral “program” has been reset. After dragging the prey back to the opening of the nest, once again the Sphex is compelled to inspect the nest, so the prey is again dropped and left outside during another stereotypical inspection of the nest. This iteration can be repeated again and again, with the Sphex never seeming to notice what is going on, never able to escape from its programmed sequence of behaviors. Dennett’s argument quotes an account of Sphex behavior from Dean Wooldridge’s Machinery of the Brain (1963). Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett have used this mechanistic behavior as an example of how seemingly thoughtful behavior can actually be quite mindless, the opposite of free will (or, as Hofstadter described it, sphexishness).
So ants don’t have agency. The difference between intelligence and agency seems to me to vanish for sufficiently intelligent minds but is relevant to humans. Like ArisKatsaris I think that for humans, intelligence is the ability to solve problems but agency is the ability to prioritize which problems to solve. It seems to me to be much easier to test for intelligence than for agency; I thought for a little bit awhile ago about how to test my own agency (and in particular to see how it varies with time of day, hunger level, etc.) but didn’t come up with any good ideas.
One sign of sphexishness in humans is chasing after lost purposes.
CFAR’s notion of agency is roughly “the opposite of sphexishness,” a concept named after the behavior of a particular kind of wasp:
So ants don’t have agency. The difference between intelligence and agency seems to me to vanish for sufficiently intelligent minds but is relevant to humans. Like ArisKatsaris I think that for humans, intelligence is the ability to solve problems but agency is the ability to prioritize which problems to solve. It seems to me to be much easier to test for intelligence than for agency; I thought for a little bit awhile ago about how to test my own agency (and in particular to see how it varies with time of day, hunger level, etc.) but didn’t come up with any good ideas.
One sign of sphexishness in humans is chasing after lost purposes.