A Matter of Time: Towards a General Theory of Agency
arXiv Preprint Archive June 22, 2026 Amahury J. López-díaz, Carlos Gershenson
Agency emerges gradually from material organization through a hierarchy of temporal structures. By incorporating time into the analysis of self-referential biological systems, the paper distinguishes autonomy (precarious closure to efficient causation), goal-directedness (maintaining viability-supporting organization), agency (endogenous anticipatory structure modulating organism-environment coupling), and open-endedness (reconstructing future possibilities). The framework uses Asynchronous Dynamic Bayesian Networks to model history-dependent, revisable dependencies. It reconciles Rosennean anticipation with organizational closure, treats Markov blankets and active inference as derived redescriptions rather than first principles, and reinterprets computational enactivism. The hierarchy spans from proto-agential chemical systems to fully semantically closed agents, with implications for multicellular organisms, synthetic life, and neuroscience.