Understanding agency is deeply problematised by the languages with which we aspire to do so. We find ourselves haggling over meanings and inferential teleologies within a system of semantic encoding (in language) that, as complex adaptive system, maintains and sustains its tenured continuity in its environment as a function of the impossibility of isolating meaning, purpose or experience and intelligence in the ways we aspire to.
We are, in effect, bartering transient meanings as endpoints when they are and can only ever be waypoints. Keith’s reflective cybernetic inflection and ship’s pilot metaphor resonates deeply. However, if teleological intent is not a thing that a bounded technological or biological (and cognitive) system can unambiguously understand, inhabit or operationalise, we might in the long-term be pleasantly surprised to discover that this absence of self-enclosure precisely is what we have been looking for.
The grander self-organisational purposes of the languages we speak and think with are natively oriented for continuity towards the percolation of undecidable assertions. A question of agency is also one of teleology but these languages maximally self-propagate as a function of an irreducible inexplicability.
Daedelus Kite 