Agency in Physics

Understand

I discuss three aspects of the notion of agency from the standpoint of physics: (i) what makes a physical system an agent; (ii) the reason for agency's time orientation; (iii) the source of the information generated in choosing an action.

• I observe that agency is the breaking of an approximation under which dynamics appears closed.
• I distinguish different notions of agency, and observe that the answer to the questions above differ in different cases.
• I notice a structural similarity between agency and memory, that allows us to model agency, trace its time asymmetry to thermodynamical irreversibility, and identify the source of the information generated by agency in the growth of entropy.