Biological Agency / 生物能动性

Biological agency is EP256 AI时代，“自由意志”还存在吗？’s claim that living beings differ from passive matter because they initiate action toward survival, food, reproduction, avoidance, and continuation. [[TuMotuo|土摩托]] uses the contrast between a rolling stone and an ant seeking food to make the point: agency is tied to life, not only to abstract intelligence.

The concept gives the episode a middle path between hard [[CausalDeterminism|determinism]] and ungrounded spiritualism. Life is still physical and causal, but it organizes uncertainty, perception, action, and [[MeaningAsEvolvedFunction|meaning]] in ways that make “what the organism is doing” a real explanatory level.

Key Claims

• Agency begins before human verbal self-awareness; organisms act in ways that are oriented toward continuation.
• Biological agency makes meaning practical: signals matter because they guide action for a living system.
• The source treats free will as more plausible when linked to life and organism-level action than when reduced to random choice.
• AI becomes philosophically risky only if it develops comparable goal, meaning, and action structures rather than merely generating text.

Connections

• Free Will / 自由意志 and Causal Determinism / 因果决定论 - philosophical pressure and response.
• Meaning As Evolved Function / 意义作为进化功能 - meaning side of the biological account.
• Embodied Intelligence / 具身智能 and Mind-Body Union - body and cognition branch.
• AI Free-Will Risk / AI自由意志风险 - future AI implication.
• Philip Ball, Kevin Mitchell, and 土摩托 / Tu Motuo - source figures.