Is Life Just Different?
I n 1993, a team led by the planetary scientist Carl Sagan tentatively concluded that there is life on Earth.
1993年，行星科学家卡尔·萨根领导的团队初步得出地球上存在生命的结论。
Not much of a deduction, you might think — except that the researchers confined their evidence to observations made by the Galileo spacecraft , which had flown past our planet three years earlier on a looping journey to Jupiter.
你可能会认为，这并不算什么推论，只是研究人员将他们的证据局限于伽利略号宇宙飞船的观测结果，该宇宙飞船三年前在飞往木星的循环旅程中飞越了我们的星球。
So great is the transformative power of life that its presence can be detected just from the light and radio waves our planet emits or reflects into space.
生命的变革力量如此之大，以至于仅通过我们星球发射或反射到太空的光和无线电波就可以检测到它的存在。
Today we scan the cosmos for some of these telltale signatures light-years away.
今天，我们扫描宇宙，寻找光年之外的一些迹象。
Life leaves a mark, yet even now there’s no scientific consensus about what makes living things so different from inorganic substances like the rocks, gases, and oceans that are the sole components of dead worlds.
生命会留下痕迹，但即使是现在，对于是什么让生物与岩石、气体和海洋等无机物质（死亡世界的唯一组成部分）如此不同，科学界还没有达成共识。
Many scientists cite properties such as replication or metabolism.
许多科学家引用了复制或新陈代谢等特性。
Others speak in more abstract terms about the way life is out of thermodynamic equilibrium with its surroundings.
其他人用更抽象的术语谈论生命与周围环境脱离热力学平衡的方式。
But some give another kind of answer.
但也有人给出了另一种答案。
Living organisms are different because they do stuff for reasons .
生物体是不同的，因为它们做事是有原因的。
Living things have goals: to find food, to reproduce, and to survive.
生物有目标：寻找食物、繁殖和生存。
Are those just genetically programmed, or do organisms have actual agency?
这些只是基因编程的，还是生物体具有实际的作用？
It’s not enough to say that life is a nonequilibrium organized state through which there’s a constant flux of matter and energy.
仅仅说生命是一种物质和能量不断流动的非平衡组织状态是不够的。
That description applies to hurricanes, too.
这个描述也适用于飓风。
But hurricanes just are .
但飓风就是这样。
Only living entities have goals: to find food, to reproduce, to survive, sometimes simply to experience good things.
只有生物体才有目标：寻找食物、繁殖、生存，有时只是为了体验美好的事物。
(Dog owners will recognize that this is not just a human attribute.)
（狗主人会认识到这不仅仅是人类的属性。）
One way to express this idea is to say that living organisms have “agency.” It’s a hotly contested term.
表达这一想法的一种方式是说生物体具有“能动性”。这是一个备受争议的术语。
Some biologists reject it outright, at least for any organisms except humans, because we decide on our actions with conscious deliberation.
一些生物学家完全拒绝它，至少对于除人类之外的任何生物体而言，因为我们通过有意识的深思熟虑来决定我们的行为。
(Whether we’re truly the only species to do so is another issue.) Others think that agency is a fundamental attribute of all life.
（我们是否真的是唯一这样做的物种是另一个问题。）其他人认为代理是所有生命的基本属性。
Since there’s no agreed-upon definition of the term, to some extent it can mean whatever you want it to mean.
由于该术语没有达成一致的定义，因此在某种程度上它可以代表任何你想要的意思。
But the debate about biological agency touches on fundamental issues in our understanding of what it means to be alive, because agency evokes a notion that biologists and philosophers have always wrestled with: teleology, the apparent purposiveness of life.
但关于生物能动性的争论触及了我们理解生命意味着什么的基本问题，因为能动性唤起了生物学家和哲学家一直在努力思考的一个概念：目的论，即生命明显的目的性。
If we admit agency into biology, do we open the floodgates to ideas about design, vitalism, or cosmic meaning?
如果我们承认生物学中的能动性，我们是否会打开关于设计、活力论或宇宙意义的思想的闸门？
Or is it just a recognition of what makes life such a special state of matter?
或者只是认识到是什么让生命如此特殊的物质状态？
I n philosophy, “qualia” refers to the subjective qualities of our experience: what it’s like for Alice to see blue or for Bob to feel delighted.
在哲学中，“感受性”指的是我们体验的主观品质：爱丽丝看到蓝色或鲍勃感到高兴是什么感觉。
Qualia are “the ways things seem to us,” as the late philosopher Daniel Dennett put it.
正如已故哲学家丹尼尔·丹尼特所说，感受性是“事物在我们看来的方式”。
In these essays, our columnists follow their curiosity, and explore important but not necessarily answerable scientific questions.
在这些文章中，我们的专栏作家追随他们的好奇心，探索重要但不一定可以回答的科学问题。
To me, the notion of agency indeed speaks to our intuitive sense of what makes living things so special: not mere machines pushed around by environment and circumstance.
对我来说，代理的概念确实体现了我们对生物如此特别的直觉：生物不仅仅是被环境和环境推动的机器。
I suspect that aversion to agency betrays a queasiness about confronting life as something more than some kind of genetic program.
我怀疑，对代理的厌恶暴露了一种对将生活视为某种基因程序之外的东西的厌恶。
But there’s danger in the idea, too: It could so easily derail the work of studying the mechanistic explanations of how life works.
但这个想法也存在危险：它很容易使研究生命如何运作的机械解释的工作脱轨。
I’m not looking to either bury or praise agency, but to explore whether it can be a scientifically productive idea.
我并不是要埋葬或赞扬代理机构，而是要探索它是否可以成为一个具有科学生产力的想法。
To say that living things are goal-directed isn’t really a controversial statement.
说生物是有目标导向的并不是一个有争议的说法。
Biologists ranging from the evolutionary theorist Ernst Mayr to the pioneer of molecular biology Jacques Monod have acknowledged that.
从进化理论家恩斯特·迈尔到分子生物学先驱雅克·莫诺等生物学家都承认这一点。
Whether it’s a bird building a nest or a white blood cell chasing a bacterium, we can’t watch life at work without supposing that these entities are trying to accomplish something.
无论是筑巢的鸟还是追逐细菌的白细胞，我们在观察工作生活时都不能不假设这些实体正在试图完成某些事情。
The agency arguments are about what that means.
该机构的争论在于这意味着什么。
In one view, apparent goal-directedness is just the result of genetic instructions playing themselves out.
一种观点认为，明显的目标导向性只是遗传指令发挥作用的结果。
Organisms are automata directed by their genes, and natural selection favors gene variants that make the organisms behave one way and not another.
生物体是由其基因指导的自动机，自然选择有利于基因变异，使生物体以一种方式而不是另一种行为。
In this mechanistic, gene-centered view of life, apparent agency is merely the performance of automated routines refined over many generations.
在这种机械的、以基因为中心的生命观中，表面的能动性只不过是经过许多代人完善的自动化程序的表现。
Is that really all there is to life?
这真的是生活的全部吗？
It’s far from clear that all organismal behavior can be attributed to particular genes.
所有有机体行为都可以归因于特定基因还远不清楚。
Think of a hare fleeing from a fox.
想象一下一只逃离狐狸的野兔。
Sure, its genes are involved in the formation of networks of neurons that enable behaviors that contribute to a state of not being eaten.
当然，它的基因参与神经元网络的形成，这些神经元网络能够实现有助于不被吃掉的状态的行为。
But are genes responsible somehow for the decision to dart to the left or right, to hide or to run, or even to stand and fight?
但是，基因是否在某种程度上决定了向左或向右冲刺、隐藏或逃跑、甚至站立和战斗的决定？
Genetics might impose behavioral biases (say, making a hare generally risk-averse), but organisms make decisions by integrating a wealth of contextual and contingent information on the fly, including learned experience.
遗传学可能会造成行为偏差（例如，使野兔通常厌恶风险），但生物体通过即时整合大量背景信息和偶然信息（包括学到的经验）来做出决策。
In one view, agency is neither more nor less than this ability to set proximal goals — not “Shall I reproduce some day?” but rather, “What action shall I take right now?” — and then act upon oneself and one’s environment to attain them.
在一种观点中，能动性就是设定近期目标的能力，而不是“有一天我应该重现吗？”而是“我现在应该采取什么行动？” ——然后根据自己和环境采取行动来实现这些目标。
“I understand agency to be the capacity of an entity to act in the world, for reasons [of its own],” said the neuroscientist Kevin Mitchell of Trinity College Dublin, whose 2023 book Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will presented an argument for how this capacity developed through evolution.
都柏林三一学院的神经科学家凯文·米切尔 (Kevin Mitchell) 表示：“我认为代理是一个实体出于自身原因在世界上采取行动的能力。”他的 2023 年著作《自由代理：进化如何赋予我们自由意志》提出了这种能力如何通过进化发展的论点。
“I think all living organisms can act as causal entities,” he said — not as mere vehicles steered by genetic prompts, but as agents that can be meaningfully said to be a genuine cause of change in the world.
“我认为所有生物体都可以充当因果实体，”他说——不仅仅是作为由遗传提示引导的载体，而是作为可以有意义地说是世界变化的真正原因的媒介。
We wouldn’t say it was your atoms that caused your coffee to get made this morning, nor was it really your genes.
我们不会说是你的原子导致了你今天早上的咖啡，也不是你的基因。
It was you , a decision-making agent, who made that happen.
是你，一个决策者，让这一切发生了。
If we admit agency into biology, do we open the floodgates to ideas about design, vitalism, or cosmic meaning?
如果我们承认生物学中的能动性，我们是否会打开关于设计、活力论或宇宙意义的思想的闸门？
Or is it just a recognition of what makes life such a special state of matter?
或者只是认识到是什么让生命如此特殊的物质状态？
Mitchell is wary of rigid definitions, however.
然而，米切尔对严格的定义持谨慎态度。
“People often take [such definitions] as a fixed set of criteria that they then use for demarcating a phenomenon in an all-or-none fashion,” he said — either it is an agent or it isn’t.
“人们经常将[此类定义]视为一组固定的标准，然后用它们以全有或全无的方式来划分一种现象，”他说——要么它是一个代理人，要么不是。
“I don’t think that’s helpful or appropriate because I don’t think agency is that kind of phenomenon.
“我认为这没有帮助或合适，因为我不认为代理是那种现象。
But if you approach behavior in a more holistic, systems-oriented, ecologically contextualized view, you’ll be investigating agency by default.”
但如果你以更全面、更系统、更生态的角度来看待行为，你就会默认调查机构。”
Samir Okasha , a philosopher of biology at the University of Bristol, is hesitant to invoke this sort of agency.
布里斯托大学生物学哲学家萨米尔·奥卡沙 (Samir Okasha) 对于是否启用此类机构犹豫不决。
He said that it’s important to distinguish between two ideas: that organisms are real agents, or that they merely act as if they are.
他说，区分两种观点很重要：有机体是真正的主体，或者它们只是表现得好像它们是真正的主体一样。
“Very often,” he said, “agency seems no more than a fancy synonym for phenotypic or behavioral plasticity” — the ability of organisms to show different responses to a given stimulus.
“很多时候，”他说，“能动性似乎只不过是表型或行为可塑性的一个奇特的同义词”——有机体对给定刺激表现出不同反应的能力。
“But then the claim that organisms exhibit agency is really just a gloss on something that science has always known, and doesn’t represent a deep philosophical insight.” Even the most gene-centric evolutionary biologist recognizes that many organisms can adapt their behavior to present circumstances and can often be considered to make choices.
“但是，生物体表现出能动性的说法实际上只是对科学已知事物的一种注释，并不代表深刻的哲学洞察力。”即使是最以基因为中心的进化生物学家也认识到，许多生物体可以根据当前情况调整其行为，并且通常可以考虑做出选择。
But without an ability to self-consciously reflect on the options and the likely outcomes of actions, does that rise to the level of true agency?
但是，如果没有能力自觉地反思选择和行动的可能结果，这是否会上升到真正的代理水平？
James DiFrisco , a philosopher and theoretical biologist at the Francis Crick Institute in London, thinks not.
伦敦弗朗西斯·克里克研究所的哲学家和理论生物学家詹姆斯·迪弗里斯科不这么认为。
Agency, he said, is a psychological concept traditionally used to talk about human behavior.
他说，代理是一个传统上用于谈论人类行为的心理学概念。
Importing it into biology as a whole risks imputing a kind of cryptic self-awareness to all life.
将其作为一个整体引入生物学可能会冒着将一种神秘的自我意识赋予所有生命的风险。
“Agency is a term whose meaning comes from human interpersonal discourse, which takes place in the vocabulary of intentions, beliefs, freedom, deliberation, and personhood,” he said.
“能动性这个术语的含义来自于人类人际对话，它出现在意图、信仰、自由、深思熟虑和人格等词汇中，”他说。
It’s not clear how to transfer that word to situations where those concepts simply don’t apply.
目前尚不清楚如何将这个词转移到那些概念根本不适用的情况。
But what about the goal-directedness of organisms?
但是生物体的目标导向性又如何呢？
This, DiFrisco said, is “something that evolved by natural selection and is therefore a state of adaptation.” In other words, organisms are adapted — genetically predisposed — to achieve things by various means, and the goal is the aspect of fitness the behavior serves.
迪弗里斯科说，这是“通过自然选择进化而来的东西，因此是一种适应状态。”换句话说，生物体适应（遗传倾向）通过各种方式实现目标，而目标是行为所服务的适应性方面。
But to say that they themselves devise their goals, he said, is untestable and nonexplanatory, “unless we’re dealing with cognitive subjects that can report on their own mental states.”
但他说，说他们自己制定目标是无法测试和解释的，“除非我们处理的是能够报告自己心理状态的认知对象。”
In 2025, DiFrisco and his colleague Richard Gawne published a critique in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology arguing that biological agency is therefore “a concept without a research program.” Either it’s invoking something already familiar in biological science, or it’s conjuring up some almost mystical force that makes organisms do things.
2025 年，迪弗里斯科和他的同事理查德·高恩在《进化生物学杂志》上发表了一篇评论，认为生物机构因此是“一个没有研究计划的概念”。要么它引用了生物科学中已经熟悉的东西，要么它召唤了某种近乎神秘的力量来使有机体做事。
This force, they said, is resistant to explanation in terms of causal mechanisms: a vague kind of “holistic power” that doesn’t really explain anything, much as the 18th-century notion of a “vital force” animating living things was really just an empty explanation.
他们说，这种力量难以用因果机制来解释：一种模糊的“整体力量”，并不能真正解释任何事情，就像 18 世纪赋予生物生命的“生命力”概念实际上只是一个空洞的解释。
Some people, DiFrisco suggested, “are playing on the ambiguity of ‘agency’ to support the idea that biology shows the need for some quasi-spiritual reality.”
迪弗里斯科表示，有些人“正在利用‘能动性’的模糊性来支持生物学表明需要某种准精神现实的观点。”
The biologist Sonia Sultan of Wesleyan University, whose collaborative work on agency is among that critiqued by DiFrisco and Gawne, argues that they misunderstood what was being proposed.
卫斯理大学的生物学家索尼娅·苏丹 (Sonia Sultan) 在代理方面的合作工作受到了迪弗里斯科和加恩的批评，她认为他们误解了所提议的内容。
“There is nothing supra-materialistic or otherwise spooky in a perspective that takes into account the empirically verifiable developmental and evolutionary agency of organisms, explicitly understood as the physical outcomes of natural processes expressing neither conscious desire nor intentionality,” she said.
她说：“从一个考虑到可经验验证的有机体发育和进化机构的角度来看，没有什么超物质主义或其他令人毛骨悚然的东西，这些机构被明确理解为自然过程的物理结果，既不表达有意识的欲望，也不表达意向性。”
In other words, she separates biological agency from complex psychology and believes the widespread existence of agency to be a testable hypothesis.
换句话说，她将生物能动性与复杂的心理学分开，并相信能动性的广泛存在是一个可检验的假设。
In 2022 Sultan, along with the biologist Armin Moczek and the philosopher Denis Walsh , argued that agency can fill in some “explanatory gaps left by prevailing gene-focused approaches in our understanding of phenotype determination, inheritance, and the origin of novel traits.” In particular, they said that it takes into account how organisms interact with their environment and demands a wider view of inheritance beyond genes.
2022 年，苏丹与生物学家阿明·莫切克 (Armin Moczek) 和哲学家丹尼斯·沃尔什 (Denis Walsh) 认为，代理可以填补一些“在我们对表型决定、遗传和新性状起源的理解中流行的以基因为中心的方法留下的解释空白”。他们特别表示，它考虑了生物体如何与其环境相互作用，并要求对基因之外的遗传有更广泛的认识。
Biological agency, the researchers continued, is thus “the capacity of a [living] system to participate in its own persistence, maintenance, and function by regulating its own structures and activities in response to the conditions it encounters.”
研究人员继续说道，生物能动性是“一个[生命]系统通过调节自身结构和活动来应对其遇到的条件，从而参与其自身持久性、维持和功能的能力。”
In support of this perspective, the philosopher Álvaro Moreno of the University of the Basque Country in Spain said that organisms don’t just detect and respond to changes in their environment but “possess the capacity to modify them.” Even Charles Darwin recognized this, which is why admitting agency into the living world isn’t some kind of mystical challenge to Darwinism.
为了支持这一观点，西班牙巴斯克大学的哲学家阿尔瓦罗·莫雷诺表示，生物体不仅能够检测环境的变化并对其做出反应，而且“拥有改变环境的能力”。就连查尔斯·达尔文也认识到了这一点，这就是为什么承认代理进入生活世界并不是对达尔文主义的某种神秘挑战。
The 18th-century French zoologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck went further.
18 世纪的法国动物学家让-巴蒂斯特·拉马克走得更远。
He believed, in the words of the Stanford University historian Jessica Riskin , his latest biographer , that “life at its essence is creative agency” — in contrast to the view then prevailing that the only real agency in the natural world was of divine origin.
用他最新的传记作者、斯坦福大学历史学家杰西卡·里斯金的话来说，他相信“生命本质上是创造性的能动性”——这与当时盛行的观点形成鲜明对比，即自然界中唯一真正的能动性是来自神圣的。
While Darwin differed from Lamarck about the source of evolutionary change, both placed the ability of organisms to act for themselves at the center of their theories.
虽然达尔文与拉马克在进化变化的根源上存在分歧，但两人都将生物体自我行动的能力置于其理论的中心。
We need a proper theory of agency, of a sort that can indeed furnish some sort of research program.
我们需要一种适当的代理理论，一种确实可以提供某种研究计划的理论。
These choices made by the organism can feed back into their own evolution.
有机体做出的这些选择可以反馈到它们自身的进化中。
The decision to change diet or move to a new habitat, simply because of an impulse to explore options, can alter the selective pressures a population experiences and thus its evolutionary trajectory.
仅仅因为探索选择的冲动而决定改变饮食或搬到新的栖息地，可以改变种群经历的选择压力，从而改变其进化轨迹。
Crucially, for example, no gene is telling the organism, “Go and eat that new plant.” The organism itself takes the initiative.
例如，至关重要的是，没有基因告诉生物体“去吃那棵新植物”。有机体本身采取主动。
In this sense agency is already invoked in conventional evolutionary theory: It is called “behavioral drive,” whereby new adaptive traits emerge just because a group of organisms chose to do something new.
从这个意义上说，传统的进化理论已经引用了代理：它被称为“行为驱动”，新的适应性特征仅仅因为一群有机体选择做新的事情而出现。
This phenomenon is akin to the so-called Baldwin effect, first identified as “a new factor in evolution” by the 19th-century psychologist Mark Baldwin, in which non-innate behavioral choices, perhaps ones that are socially learned, themselves create new selective pressures that lead to those choices becoming genetically fixed in the population.
这种现象类似于所谓的鲍德温效应，19世纪心理学家马克·鲍德温首次将其称为“进化中的新因素”，即非先天的行为选择（也许是社会习得的行为选择）本身会产生新的选择压力，导致这些选择在人群中通过基因固定。
In other words, if you want to exclude agency from evolution, it’s too late.
换句话说，如果你想将代理排除在进化之外，那就太晚了。
But why do we have to call it that?
但为什么我们一定要这么称呼它呢？
The behaviors of organisms are already studied and understood from a variety of perspectives.
生物体的行为已经从多种角度进行了研究和理解。
Neuroscientists, for example, look at the decision-making circuits of brains, biophysicists look at the molecular pathways that govern the responses of bacteria to environmental signals such as nutrient concentration or heat, animal behavioralists think about cognitive mechanisms, and so on.
例如，神经科学家研究大脑的决策回路，生物物理学家研究控制细菌对营养浓度或热量等环境信号的反应的分子途径，动物行为学家研究认知机制，等等。
Why complicate that research with a fancy label that just muddies the waters?
为什么要用一个只会搅浑水的花哨标签来使研究复杂化呢？
“A lot of work on agency is playing on the ambiguity of the term, which is suggestive that there are higher cognitive processes than we’d expect in simple organisms,” DiFrisco said.
迪弗里斯科说：“关于能动性的许多工作都在利用这个术语的模糊性，这表明简单有机体中存在比我们预期的更高的认知过程。”
When Sultan and colleagues say that agency — the capacity to act in a way that is conducive to an organism’s goal — can be used to predict and explain behavior, DiFrisco and Gawne charge that this makes it circular.
当苏丹和同事说代理——以有利于有机体目标的方式行动的能力——可以用来预测和解释行为时，迪弗里斯科和加恩指责这使它成为循环。
The idea that an organism did something “because of its agency,” they argue, resists any further analysis.
他们认为，有机体“由于其代理作用”而做出某事的观点无法进行任何进一步的分析。
But Sultan and colleagues disagree with this characterization of how their notion of agency should be applied.
但苏丹和同事不同意这种关于如何应用他们的代理概念的描述。
This aspect of the debate hinges on how we attribute the causes of actions.
争论的这一方面取决于我们如何归因行为的原因。
Is agency itself a causal factor, or is it a higher-level umbrella term for a host of specific and particular reasons that things happen?
能动性本身是一个因果因素，还是一个更高层次的概括性术语，用于描述事情发生的一系列具体和特殊原因？
To put it another way: Agents make decisions — that’s what agency means — but do organisms?
换句话说：代理做出决定——这就是代理的意思——但是有机体也会做决定吗？
For DiFrisco, speaking of organismal decisions “is just a convenient and compact way of referring to the operation of a (multiscale) mechanism” that determines behavior — a mechanism that is perfectly capable of incorporating context and conflicting signals.
对于 DiFrisco 来说，谈到有机决策“只是一种方便而紧凑的方式来指代决定行为的（多尺度）机制的运作”——一种完全能够整合背景和冲突信号的机制。
But for me, the key point here is that the actions can be governed by reasons and goals.
但对我来说，这里的关键点是行动可以由原因和目标来控制。
The hare is genuinely trying to escape the fox; it doesn’t merely look that way.
兔子是真心实意地想逃离狐狸；它不仅仅是看起来那样。
And the hare did not have that specific goal before the fox appeared.
在狐狸出现之前，兔子并没有那个特定的目标。
Perhaps it had been trying to forage and to look out for predators.
也许它一直在试图觅食并留意捕食者。
Such “trying to” is the fundamental nature of organisms: Evolution builds entities that try to do things.
这种“尝试”是有机体的基本本质：进化建立了尝试做某事的实体。
Maybe we can focus this debate by asking what the concept of agency buys us that can’t be obtained without it.
也许我们可以通过询问代理概念给我们带来了什么，而没有它就无法获得什么来集中这场辩论。
“This is a really key question,” Mitchell said.
“这是一个非常关键的问题，”米切尔说。
If agency is going to be more than a philosophical stance — if it’s going to be useful for doing science — then first it needs to be “naturalized,” as Mitchell and his colleague Henry Potter have put it: We need a proper theory of agency, of a sort that can indeed furnish some sort of research program.
如果能动性不仅仅是一种哲学立场——如果它对科学研究有用——那么首先它需要被“自然化”，正如米切尔和他的同事亨利·波特所说：我们需要一种适当的能动性理论，一种确实可以提供某种研究计划的理论。
At present, nothing like that really exists, but it’s possible to set out some of the issues it would need to confront.
目前，这样的东西并不存在，但可以列出它需要面对的一些问题。
For example: How exactly do organisms determine their goals?
例如：生物体究竟如何确定它们的目标？
How are those aims represented (if at all) in the molecular or neural mechanics of the organism?
这些目标在生物体的分子或神经机制中是如何体现的（如果有的话）？
How do organisms integrate information (including information about their own internal state) to come up with a decision about how to act?
生物体如何整合信息（包括有关其自身内部状态的信息）来做出如何行动的决定？
Can we measure how much agency an entity has — or what kind of agency?
我们能否衡量一个实体拥有多少代理权——或者什么样的代理权？
“I think developing empirical indicators for measuring different dimensions of agency would be the primary way to go for turning agency into a scientific concept,” Potter said.
波特说：“我认为开发衡量代理不同维度的实证指标将是将代理转变为科学概念的主要途径。”
Some researchers have asserted that agents need particular kinds of internal architectures to govern the relationships between senses, cognitive processes, actions, and needs.
一些研究人员断言，智能体需要特定类型的内部架构来管理感官、认知过程、行动和需求之间的关系。
Moreno, for example, has argued that this organization involves feedback loops that don’t just enable adaptation to the environment but let the system alter that environment — for example, simply by moving from one location to another with a different set of conditions.
例如，莫雷诺认为，该组织涉及反馈循环，这些反馈循环不仅能够适应环境，还能让系统改变环境——例如，简单地从一个位置移动到具有不同条件的另一个位置。
The theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman has argued that properties like this depend on what he calls “organizational closure,” in which the parts are collectively self-maintaining, each of them supporting the functions of the others.
理论生物学家斯图尔特·考夫曼认为，这样的特性取决于他所谓的“组织封闭”，其中各个部分集体自我维护，每个部分都支持其他部分的功能。
This property, Kauffman says, gives the whole system “causal power” — Mitchell’s ability for an agent to act on its own behalf rather than just being a passive vehicle for lower-level causes.
考夫曼说，这一特性赋予了整个系统“因果力量”——米切尔让代理人能够代表自己采取行动，而不仅仅是充当较低层次原因的被动工具。
Meanwhile, the neuroscientist Karl Friston has argued that agency arises in entities that can make predictions about the outcomes of behaviors and then compare those with what actually transpires, and seek to minimize the disparity between the two (none of which demands an ability to reflect on that comparison with conscious self-awareness).
与此同时，神经科学家卡尔·弗里斯顿（Karl Friston）认为，能动性产生于能够对行为结果进行预测的实体中，然后将其与实际发生的情况进行比较，并寻求最小化两者之间的差异（其中任何一个都不需要有能力反思与有意识的自我意识的比较）。
At this level it can all sound a bit abstract and remote from actual biology.
在这个层面上，它听起来有点抽象，与实际的生物学相距甚远。
But I’m cautiously optimistic about the prospects of uniting such theoretical ideas with biological mechanisms.
但我对将这些理论思想与生物机制结合起来的前景持谨慎乐观的态度。
It seems unlikely to be coincidental, for example, that organisms that seem to show more agency also have molecular pathways that permit more openness to the influence of context and external information.
例如，似乎表现出更多代理作用的生物体也具有允许对环境和外部信息的影响更加开放的分子途径，这似乎不太可能是巧合。
If we can get a clearer idea of what makes an agent, this could help us to understand how collective goals arise — as they did when multicellular organisms first arose long ago — and how they can break down, as in cancer.
如果我们能够更清楚地了解代理的构成因素，这可以帮助我们理解集体目标是如何产生的——就像很久以前多细胞生物首次出现时那样——以及它们如何分解，就像在癌症中一样。
What’s more, a proper theory of agency might give us a clearer idea of what’s needed to make genuine artificial agents, not just computers and machines programmed with our own goals, but ones that can formulate their own.
更重要的是，正确的代理理论可能会让我们更清楚地了解制造真正的人工智能代理所需的东西，不仅是按照我们自己的目标编程的计算机和机器，而且还可以制定自己的目标。
We might then also get a clearer idea of the potential benefits and dangers such truly agential machines might bring.
然后我们也可能会更清楚地了解这种真正的代理机器可能带来的潜在好处和危险。
But perhaps the most compelling argument for recognizing agency is that it might help us understand what makes life so different — not just humans, but life — that it is able to shape an entire planet in a manner visible from outer space.
但也许承认能动性的最令人信服的论点是，它可能帮助我们理解是什么让生命如此不同——不仅仅是人类，还有生命——以至于它能够以从外太空可见的方式塑造整个星球。
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