I think there is some basic research missing here.
For example, presumably human+ level AI could be considered agenty, or even alive. However, as far as I know, we have no good definition of what separates life from non-life outside of the one type of life we see on Earth. The boundary being that prions are non-life, viruses are kind-of life, and bacteria are definitely life, judging by the definition like “genetic information metabolism”.
I suspect that a more promising approach is more of a black-box one, combined with a white-box one, where life and agents act as more adversarial and anti-inductive than non-life, regardless of the underlying physics/biology. A description like that would cover most of life on Earth, as well as much of the simulated life in, say, computer games. However, it might go too far, as there are plenty of phenomena we don’t identify as alive that behave in such a way. Presumably some combination of heritability and mutability would lead to something that is alive and agenty. I have not seen much research done in that direction.
I think there is some basic research missing here.
For example, presumably human+ level AI could be considered agenty, or even alive. However, as far as I know, we have no good definition of what separates life from non-life outside of the one type of life we see on Earth. The boundary being that prions are non-life, viruses are kind-of life, and bacteria are definitely life, judging by the definition like “genetic information metabolism”.
I suspect that a more promising approach is more of a black-box one, combined with a white-box one, where life and agents act as more adversarial and anti-inductive than non-life, regardless of the underlying physics/biology. A description like that would cover most of life on Earth, as well as much of the simulated life in, say, computer games. However, it might go too far, as there are plenty of phenomena we don’t identify as alive that behave in such a way. Presumably some combination of heritability and mutability would lead to something that is alive and agenty. I have not seen much research done in that direction.