On the evolution of agency and implications for comprehensively modeling it

The basic premise of this proposed article is that agency is an evolved trait. Agency in nature exists to the degree that organisms can act independently from their environment, and is here considered to be the result of an evolutionary process that takes places hierarchically and in multiple dimensions. The article proposes further discussion on the need to create appropriate simulation methodologies that capture the multiple levels of reality, particularly in the social and biological realms. Such methodologies should allow for the joint representation of micro, meso and macro ontological levels of agency. This work proposes the methodology of Distributed Agency as a means to capture the fractal nature of the agents that may more realistically capture the contextualized interaction present in social and biological phenomena. Agency is proposed as a ‘currency’ in which we can express structure and information to express and eventually understand the way in which evolutionary processes interact to create the complex world we inhabit.