Agency

Perhaps both p-individuals and autonomous cognitive social systems have agency.

Agency

We consider goal-directedness and agency to be one and the same. A resilient organization exhibits goal-directedness or ‘agency’. The term ‘agency’ expresses the action-oriented, self-steering or self-correcting aspect of goal-directedness. An agentic or goal-directed system can pursue and achieve its own goals by autonomously controlling perturbations. In other words, instead of being passively subjected to external forces, it can actively counter or exploit these forces and alter its environment (or itself) in the service of its goals of survival and growth.

An agent is a representation of an action. ... The necessity of this representation is seen when we describe a human being and want to distingush between the human's body and and the way (s)he acts.

When we speak of an action, we speak also of an agent that performs the action. An agent is the carrier of will, the entity that chooses between possible actions.

From Principia Cybernetica: Agent

Schopenhauer's formula for all that exists is:

the world = will + representation

Will is manifested in action. Will and action are inseparable. We understand will as the quality that allows to choose between the (possible) options and act. Action and will are two faces of essentially the same phenomenon, and in our philosophy action is its perceivable part. We rewrite Schopenhauer's formula as follows:

the perceivable world = action + representation

From Principia Cybernetica: Action

... Emmeche et al. 2002 has an entry for 'agency' (p.26): "the ability of an organism to act in order to fulfill needs; may be defined as a 'stable integration of self-reference and other-reference". ... In [Barbieri et al. 2014]'s code biology definition, an 'agent' is a (living) system which connects the objects of two 'independent worlds', or realms. In this understanding agents occur at different levels of biological organizations, from the biomolecular level to that of culture, everywhere giving rise to correspondences between signs and meanings.

... unlike other living agents, only moral agents can be held responsible for what they do. Eshleman states that "only beings possessing the general capacity to evalute reasons for acting can be moral agents", and furthermore notes that "a moral agent can be responsible for an action she has preformed only if she performed it freely, where acting freely entails the ability to have done otherwise at the time of action" (ibid). As we see the idea of moral agency is closely associated with the notion of free will. Combined these agency-related notions constitute central elements of the general concept of agenthood as applied in the human context, where the specifically human kind of being is traditionally conceived of as exceptionally morally responsible and free-willed.

... I will focus here on a simple typology of biosemiotic agents. My starting point is that agency can be attributed at different levels of biological organization, from the cell (if not even at a subcellular level) to the ecosystem. Among what these various living systems, which may all be regarded as sign systems, have in common is that they are 1) goal-directed and 2) self-governed (i.e., self-regulating), and that they constitute 3) units of processing of semiosis and 4) units of action-related choice-making. These shared features, I suggest, are to a large extent constitutive of biosemiotic agents - in other words, they are vital for the functioning of the living system in question. Life is indeed fundamentally agential. This ontological observation is augmented by the fact that biosemiotic agents are in effect world-changing powers which add to the complexity of abiotic nature.

Biologists discussing the agency aspect of organismic life use terms such as "action selection" (Prescott 2007), "decision-making" (Esch and Kristan 2002), "behavioral choice" (Kristan and Shaw 1987) or "motor program selection" (Kupfermann and Weiss 2001). The intrumental aura of such terms cannot cover the fact, however, that those terms are either meaningless or expressions of a basic agency of living systems. In the absence of organismic agency natural selection would hardly work, since 'competition' depends on a plurality of agents striving for the same good. From the very beginning, organisms must have possessed some modest capacity for directing their agency towards self-sustaining activity. This implies that they must have possessed means for measuring vital parameters of their environments and 'selecting' their activity accordingly, which exactly is what semiosis is all about. Semiosis must have been, from the beginning, an important element in evolution, and the sophistication of the semiotic capacity of organisms will have been one basic way of escaping extinction...