Agency

The state-dependent generative capacity to recognize what you genuinely want and take coherent actions toward it, even when circumstances change. It begins with authentic desire -- the internal motivating factor that differentiates agency from merely responding to external pressures or expectations. Agency is choosing: creating options, originating direction, seeing things differently.

Requires autonomy as a precondition but is not reducible to it.

Nearest academic equivalents

• Self-determination (Ryan & Deci 2000)
• Practical reason (Nussbaum 2000)
• Self-governance (Bratman 2007)

Delta from academic usage

Foregrounds biological state-dependence. Agency fluctuates on timescales of minutes based on neurobiological state, not just developmental or social context. Distinguishes agency (generative origination) from autonomy (evaluative selection). The architecture directly targets autonomy maintenance to enable agency.

"Recognizing what you genuinely want" connects to the wanting/liking/endorsement alignment (Berridge & Robinson 2016). The temporal persistence element ("even when circumstances change") connects to Bratman's self-governing policies and to the coherence construct.

SDT provides empirical evidence (replicated across multiple populations and domains) for the autonomy prerequisite within this definition: autonomous motivation produces measurably better persistence, performance, and wellbeing across domains (Ryan & Deci 2000, 2017). SDT does not directly ground the biological state-dependency claim (which rests on the neuroscience mechanisms) or the generative/originating quality that distinguishes agency from autonomy in this specification.

Systems definition (HYPOTHESIS)

A system's ability to instantiate and preserve the possibility of transformation over time and context -- the capacity to maintain optionality and adaptive potential across varying conditions while pursuing desired outcomes. This systems definition goes beyond what the current neuroscience and philosophy can ground; it is aspirational for where the architecture eventually goes, not where the current evidence can take it.