No permanent or singular essences exist; agency is process not substance

Fundamental state of affairs: 'agent' and 'changeless' are mutually exclusive; all candidates for agency (organic, mechanic, hybrid) must change to act.

Source paper

extracted_from

Toward an ethics of autopoietic technology: Stress, care, and intelligence

(2023) · Witkowski, Olaf · Doctor, Thomas · Solomonova, Elizaveta · Duane, Bill +1

Neighborhood — ranked by edge-count

Communities (3)

community

Relational self, care & aliveness
members_of
Self as dynamic functional center defined by care, coherence, and substrate-neutral cognition
Process-based non-essentialist selfhood
members_of
Self as dynamic, care-constituted process; reducing 'selfing' increases prosocial well-being.
Self as dynamic capacity for care and plasticity
members_of
Ontology treating selfhood as emergent from caring relationships and cognitive flexibility rather than fixed essence, emphasizing substrate malleability and resistance to attractor lock-in.

Concepts (2)

concept

Morphogenesis
supports
Process by which cellular collectives generate large-scale structure and form; presented as a collective intelligence problem.
Selfless Self
supports
Model of agency in which self is constituted by dynamical patterns of care and goal-pursuit rather than permanent substance or essence.

Related by similarity (8)

cosine ≥ 0.65 · no typed edge

Entities in the same semantic neighborhood but without a typed relation to this one — candidates for new edges or unrecognized duplicates.

There are no permanent or indivisible agents; the actual nonexistence of singular and enduring individuality must be accounted for in any model of agency.claim0.830
Fundamental ontological claim underlying the selfless self model.
What Kinds Of Consciousness Or Agency Might Existquestion0.795
A system's capacity for care constitutes its self in the absence of permanent substance or essence.claim0.793
Foundational to selfless-self model; self defined by scope and nature of goals pursued, not by enduring essence.
Maturing to the point of a principled stance on sentience and agency is probably an existential requirement for humankind.concept0.777
Load-bearing conclusion: generalized sentience frameworks are essential for ethical and survival-level reasons.
The SCI loop provides a perspective on agency that does not require recourse to explanatory burdensome notions of permanent and singular essences.claim0.776
Highlights the dynamic and non-essentialist nature of agency in the proposed framework.
Unitary individuals have no substantial existence; this must be accounted for in any model of agency.claim0.767
Grounding claim for the selfless self model.
There is no such thing as neutrality in such matters. A process is either life-creating, or it is not.claim0.766
In every case, the process is straightforward, simple, and above all free: it allows the reality of the situation, the human needs, human joys, to find expression.claim0.765
A summary generalization from the examples about the nature of living processes.

Cross-corpus bridges (3)

same_concept_as · Nomic cosine

External markdown files that talk about the same concept as this entity.

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How can self and individuality be understood without recourse to permanent, singular essences or substances?questions/how-can-self-and-individuality-be-understood-without.md0.806
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Can intelligent systems be understood without recourse to permanent and singular essences or substances?questions/can-intelligent-systems-be-understood-without-recourse-to.md0.792
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If there are no truly unitary and enduring agents or selves, why do systems seem to operate as if they were?questions/if-there-are-no-truly-unitary-and-enduring.md0.784