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shminux comments on Agency is bugs and uncertainty - Less Wrong Discussion
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The weather does not seem at all agenty to me. (People in former times have so regarded it; but we are not talking about former times.)
I agree. As I mentioned in the post, expected randomness is not the same as unpredictability. Also as mentioned in the post, if you were trying to escape, say, a tornado, and repeatedly failing to predict where it would move and end up in danger again and again, it would feel to you like this weather phenomenon "has a mind of its own".
Another example is the original Gaia hypothesis, which framed a local equilibrium of the Earth's environment in teleological terms.
The tornado isn't going to follow you by chance. In fact, if it does follow you despite your efforts to evade it, that would be evidence of agentiness, of purpose. Something would have to be actively trying to steer it towards you.
For those going to LWCW in Berlin this weekend, this is one of the things I'll be talking about.
Here is a counterexample: Suppose, unbeknownst to you, your movement creates a disturbance in the air that results in the tornado changing its path. Unless you can deduce this, you would assign agentiness to a weather phenomenon, whereas the only agentiness here (if any) is your own.
Oh, and if you have slides or a transcript of your talk, feel free to post it here, could be interesting.
At this point we must play "follow the improbability". When you imagine the tornado following you around, however you try to get away from it, I ask, "what is the mechanism of this remarkably improbable phenomenon?" It seems that the agency is being supplied by your imagination, wrapped up in the word "suppose".
More illuminating are some real examples of something following something else around.
A bumper sticker follows the car it is attached to. Wherever the car goes, there goes the bumper sticker.
Iron filings follow a magnet around.
Objects near a planet follow the planet around.
A dog follows its master around.
Here, we're looking closely at the edge of the concept of purpose, and that it may be fuzzy is of little significance, since everything is fuzzy under a sufficiently strong magnifying glass. I draw the line between purpose and no purpose between 3 and 4. One recipe for drawing the line is that purpose requires the expenditure of some source of energy to accomplish the task. Anything less and it is like a ball in a bowl: the energy with which it tries to go to the centre was supplied by the disturbance that knocked it away. You expend no energy to remain near the Earth's surface; the dog does expend energy to stay with its master.
I won't know what I'm going to say until I've said it, but I'll try to do a writeup afterwards.