Abstract
Ultimately we will only understand biological agency when we have
developed a theory of the organization of biological processes, and
science is still a long way from attaining that goal. It may be possible
nonetheless to develop a list of necessary conditions for the emergence
of minimal biological agency. The authors offer a model of molecular
autonomous agents which meets the five minimal physical conditions
that are necessary (and, we believe, conjointly sufficient) for applying
agential language in biology: autocatalytic reproduction; work cycles;
boundaries for reproducing individuals; self-propagating work and
constraint construction; and choice and action that have evolved
to respond to food or poison. When combined with the arguments from
preadaptation and multiple realizability, the existence of these
agents is sufficient to establish ontological emergence as against
what one might call Weinbergian reductionism. Minimal biological
agents are emphatically not conscious agents, and accepting their
existence does not commit one to any robust theory of human agency.
Nor is there anything mystical, dualistic, or non-empirical about
the emergence of agency in the biosphere. Hence the emergence of
molecular autonomous agents, and indeed ontological emergence in
general, is not a negation of or limitation on careful biological
study but simply one of its implications.
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