One of the MAP [[map:t:here|terms]]

====== agent (MAP term) ======

See [[https://memetic-activation-platform.github.io/docs-understanding-map/understanding-the-map/appendices/glossary/#agent|agent]] in the [[https://memetic-activation-platform.github.io/docs-understanding-map/understanding-the-map/appendices/glossary/|Glossary]], and the section on [[https://memetic-activation-platform.github.io/docs-understanding-map/understanding-the-map/agents-and-spaces/|Agents and Spaces]].

In the MAP, an Agent is defined as 
> any entity capable of sensing and responding to its environment. It may be biological (e.g., a person, whale, or tree), technical (e.g., a computing process), or social (e.g., a family, cooperative, or commons).

===== Related terms =====
> Every Agent has a unique identity and a corresponding [[I-Space]] — a private [[AgentSpace]] that houses its [[LifeCode]], [[Data Grove]], and core affordances.
Agents can make [[offer]]s and accept offers made by others to form [[Agreement]]s.

===== Commentary =====
[[a:aSimonG]]:
That is a very broad definition. The challenge is that the MAP is including all these various levels of thing, in contrast to our normal way in natural language of thinking of them as quite different kinds of thing. We are not used to seeing a bacterium and a nation state as the same kind of thing; but they both have more-or-less well defined boundaries (see [[membrane]]), and they all respond to events at their level of existence. 

For human purposes, we often think of an agent as something with deliberate or conscious agency, so that it can decide how to respond to a situation that affects it — rather than more simply, something that reacts, in what we can think of as a predictable way, to its circumstances. But this does not appear to be the MAP view.

However, it may make it easier to consider that the agents that we are principally concerned with, here and elsewhere, are indeed the kind of agents that can act deliberately and consciously. Much of the MAP is built around the ideas of [[agreement]] and [[consent]], and while it is easy to see a non-rational being "shying away" from something, it is hard to see such a being, for instance, agreeing, or giving consent, to something that may hurt it in the short term. That's not to say that animals don't behave in an altruistic manner – ants are a clear example of individual organisms sacrificing themselves for the good of the colony – but we usually consider that kind of behaviour as instinctively "programmed", not as freely chosen; just as also we don't usually consider the behaviour of computer controlled systems as freely chosen.

Let's try to work with these kinds of idea, and consider whether or not we would benefit from an alternate term for "agent".


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=== see also ===

=== backlinks ===
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