Principles of Agency

A Treatise on Agency

On causation, determinism, and the persistence of the will

I. The Compatibility of Causation and Agency

1. Determinism does not abolish agency.

Everything has causes, yet we nonetheless possess agency. That an action has causes does not mean it is subject to post-facto manipulation. In a deterministic system, we evade being predicted through mixed strategies — randomised, non-obvious courses of action — thereby mimicking free will in order to survive. Put precisely: free will is when your first-order actions align with your second-order desires — when what you do corresponds to what you want to want.

Moreover, causes do not entail inevitability. Strictly deterministic microscopic rules can generate unpredictable, complex macroscopic phenomena — emergence ensures that full knowledge of the parts does not yield prediction of the whole.

2. Causes exist, but causes are not knowable.

That causation exists does not mean that all causes can be known. When events happen to you, the causes appear transparent; yet only a learned statistician can unravel even a fraction of them. The opacity of causation is itself a condition of lived agency.

3. Causation does not abolish creativity — it enables it.

Causes being present does not mean there is no creativity; rather, creativity exists because of causes. When two rule-bound individuals play off one another, they generate something genuinely creative. The boundedness of each participant is precisely what produces the unbounded result of their interaction.

4. Causes require conditions to operate.

Causes still require a perfect environment to impact the subject. Causal influence is not unconditionally efficacious; it must find the right conditions in the subject and surroundings to take hold.

II. Environmental Determinism — The Nine Mechanisms

While agency persists, the environment exerts deterministic pressure upon it through nine distinct mechanisms:

1. Informational conformity — the shaping of belief through the uniformity of available information.
2. Normative conformity — the shaping of behaviour through the pull of social norms.
3. Dispersion of responsibility — the dilution of individual agency when responsibility is distributed across the collective.
4. Subjectification through power — the constitution of the self as a subject under relations of power.
5. Objectification through the look — the reduction of the self to an object under the gaze of the other.
6. Echo chambers through algorithms — the narrowing of one's informational world by algorithmic curation.
7. Cognitive offloading to algorithms — the transfer of thought and decision from mind to machine.
8. Geographical or linguistic determinants — the constraint of agency by place and language.
9. Cultural or economic determinants — the constraint of agency by inherited social and material conditions.

Together, these nine mechanisms describe how environment conditions the subject — while the four theses above establish that such conditioning, however pervasive, never amounts to the abolition of agency itself.

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