Summer Update #1: "Agency & Life" in Syros

(Yogi)

It's been a busy summer and I've been sorely neglecting my updates here on this site... So here are a few quick thoughts on what's been going on.

In early July, Yogi traveled to the Cyclades in Greece, to present his upcoming paper on relevance realization (a concept introduced by John Vervaeke) at a workshop organized by the John Templeton Foundation on "Agency & Life." The workshop included a number of illustrious proponents and opponents of agential views of the organism.

The basic idea behind the argument is that all organisms (not just human beings) must be able to realize what is relevant in their environment. This ability is absent in non-living systems such as AI "agents." The paper shows why: relevance realization is fundamentally not algorithmic. Instead, it is rooted in the peculiar autopoietic, anticipatory, and adaptive organization of living beings. It is the foundation of organismic agency. Cognition and consciousness, in turn, can be seen as evolutionary elaboration on the same theme.

A manuscript and preprint on the topic is forthcoming.