Background:

This workshop has not been held previously, but it has some aspects in common with the workshops “The Biological Foundations of Enactivism” (ALife 2016) and “Philosophical and Mathematical Conceptions of Agency” (SAB 2016). Other related projects include FQXi’s Physics of the Observer.

There are also several scientific books, articles, and dissertations on the foundations of agency that have come out over the last few decades. Some of them are listed below.

Related References:

  • Ay, N., & Zahedi, K. (2013). On the causal structure of the sensorimotor loop. Guided Self-Organization: Inception, 9, 261.
  • Agmon, E. (2016). The foundation of agency (Doctoral dissertation, Indiana University).
  • Barandiaran, X. E., Di Paolo, E., & Rohde, M. (2009). Defining agency: Individuality, normativity, asymmetry, and spatio-temporality in action. Adaptive Behavior, 17(5), 367-386.
  • Beer, R. D. (2015). Characterizing autopoiesis in the game of life. Artificial life.
  • Bertschinger, N., Olbrich, E., Ay, N., & Jost, J. (2008). Autonomy: An information theoretic perspective. Biosystems, 91(2), 331-345.
  • Biehl, M. (2017). Formal approaches to a definition of agents. arXiv preprint arXiv:1704.02716.
  • Deacon, T. W. (2011). Incomplete nature: How mind emerged from matter. WW Norton & Company.
  • Dennett, D. C. (1991). Real patterns. The journal of Philosophy, 88(1), 27-51.
  • Fontana, W., & Buss, L. W. (1994). “The arrival of the fittest”: Toward a theory of biological organization. Bulletin of Mathematical Biology, 56(1), 1-64.
  • Gánti, T. (2003). Chemoton theory: theory of living systems. Springer Science & Business Media.
  • Hoel, E. P., Albantakis, L., & Tononi, G. (2013). Quantifying causal emergence shows that macro can beat micro. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110(49), 19790-19795.
  • Kauffman, S., & Clayton, P. (2006). On emergence, agency, and organization. Biology and Philosophy, 21(4), 501-521.
  • Krakauer, D., Bertschinger, N., Olbrich, E., Ay, N., & Flack, J. C. (2014). The information theory of individuality. arXiv preprint arXiv:1412.2447.
  • Libby, E., Grochow, J., DeDeo, S., & Wolpert, D. (2016). A quantitative definition of organismality and its application to lichen. arXiv preprint arXiv:1612.00036.
  • Nicholson, D. J. (2014). The return of the organism as a fundamental explanatory concept in biology. Philosophy Compass, 9(5), 347-359.
  • Ruiz-Mirazo, K., Etxeberria, A., Moreno, A., & Ibáñez, J. (2000). Organisms and their place in biology. Theory in biosciences, 119(3), 209-233.
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