Distributed Agency

Abstract

Distributed Agency is the name of a conceptual framework for describing complex adaptive systems that this paper develops. To understand the complexity of the world in a holistic fashion, the field of Modeling and Simulation is currently lacking a common terminology in which different bodies of knowledge can communicate with each other in a general language. In this work, agency is proposed as the common link between the different dimensions of reality, expressing the influence of one dimension on another. This conceptualization is based on a process of backwards induction where nested actors such as an evolved organism or a human choice can be represented as the resulting force of intertwined aims and constraints. The theoretical framework can serve as a point of reference for the social and computational researcher by communicating structural and emergent properties that are essential for the understanding of social and evolutionary phenomena such as companies, economies, governments, and ecosystems.