Agency (Part 2 of 8)

What Is Agency, and Why Has It Always Been Slippery?

Aristotle, marble portrait bust, Roman copy of a Greek original; in the Museo Nazionale Romano, Rome, Italy. (A. Dagli Orti—De Agostini/Getty Images)

Before agency became a buzzword in the age of AI, it was a philosophical dilemma, a spiritual koan, and still today, a neuroscientific puzzle. The question of whether we truly have the power to choose freely, intentionally, and not just as a conditioned response, has haunted thinkers for thousands of years.

And the haunting continues.

In ancient Greece, Aristotle didn’t use the word “agency,” but he gave us one of its clearest early blueprints. In his Nicomachean Ethics, he claimed that human beings possess the capacity for deliberation. To weigh options, to foresee consequences, to choose one action over another. He believed this ability not only existed, but that it was fundamental to our moral responsibility.

Many of the Stoic philosophers after him (namely Epictetus) believed in a cosmos governed by fate, cause and effect, logos. And yet, they argued that inner freedom was still possible by aligning with fate. If you couldn’t control the unfolding of the world, you could still control your response. That, to them, was enough.

Jump forward a few centuries, and agency gets even more complex with the existentialist movement. Kierkegaard, for one, believed that freedom was not a gift but a burden. He saw agency as the source of our deepest anxiety. It was the dizziness of possibility, the responsibility of choosing in a world without guarantees.

Nietzsche went in a different direction. He believed most people never truly act, they simply obey. Culture, religion, morality: all forces of imitation. Agency, for Nietzsche, wasn’t something we’re simply given. It’s something we had to wrestle from the grip of habit and reaction. His ideal wasn’t the rational actor, but rather the self-overcoming one.

Then came Heidegger and Sartre, who argued that to be human is to be aware of one’s own finitude, and then to act anyway. Sartre, in particular, was brutal about it: “Man is condemned to be free.” There are no excuses. No fallback plans. Just the sheer responsibility of choosing what to do with this one life, in every moment, without the comfort of certainty.

Still, each of them believed in a different flavor of at least some form of agency.

And then came the scientists.

In October 2023, Robert Sapolsky published Determined, a sweeping takedown of the very idea of free will. His conclusion: we have none. Not even a little. Every decision, every reaction, every preference – completely caused by what came before.

This idea: that every thought, action, or response is shaped entirely by prior conditions – is known as “determinism.” It’s not a new theory.

In the 17th century, philosopher Benedictus de Spinoza argued that free will was an illusion, and that everything in nature unfolds from prior causes. A century later, Pierre-Simon Laplace imagined a super-intelligence (now known as Laplace’s demon) who, if it knew the position and momentum of every atom in the universe, could predict the entire future with perfect precision. No mystery. No choice. Just inevitability, perfectly mapped.

What made Sapolsky’s argument more striking, though, was that it didn’t rely on 200-year-old beliefs. He argued from the cutting edge of neuroscience: genes, neurons, hormones, environment. Biology all the way down. Drawing from new research released earlier that year, he made a compelling case that biology, not belief, is what drives behavior.

And yet, at the exact same time, a neurogeneticist from Trinity College Dublin, Kevin Mitchell, used the exact same body of evidence to argue the opposite: that agency could, in fact, exist. His book, Free Agents, was published the same month as Sapolsky’s. Mitchell claimed that complex systems, such as brains, are indeterminant due to the underlying structure of quantum mechanics. He argued that, “this opens the door for higher level features to have some causal influence in determining which way the physical system will evolve. This influence is exerted by establishing contextual constraints. In other words, the way the system is organized can also do some causal work. In the brain, that organization embodies knowledge, beliefs, goals, and motivations.” The point he is making is that since quantum mechanics suggests that the universe is not fully determined, the burden of proof for agency is no longer borne by the person who claims that it exists, but rather on the one who claims that it is illusory.

Two leading scientists. Two brilliant minds. Two opposite conclusions. Even with access to the same set of neuroscience research and centuries of thought behind them – still split on the most basic of questions: Are we initiating action, or just explaining it after the fact?

Why does all this history matter?

Not because it gives us answers, but because it shows how enduring and unresolved this question really is. However, we don’t need a definitive definition of agency to feel its presence, or its absence. Because even if no one agrees on what agency is, we know what it feels like to lose it.

When we act out of impulse. When we scroll without choosing. When we say yes because it’s easier than facing the discomfort of no. When we realize, in retrospect, that we weren’t really there at all.

Agency isn’t just a metaphysical concept. It’s a felt experience. A posture. A practice. And in a world of increasing noise, automation, and predictive design, our relationship to that experience matters more than ever.

So what happens when we let that relationship collapse? When determinism, once just a philosophical thought experiment, becomes the dominant story we tell ourselves about who we are and how we live? When that happens, the consequences aren’t theoretical. They’re existential. And, most importantly, what happens when that existential erosion becomes normalized – when we stop even noticing its weight?

…More on that coming soon.

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