Understanding Agency Across Life Scales

Introduction
At every level of life, agency marks the difference between mere reaction and self-directed action. It is the living thread that runs from the motility of a single cell to the moral reflection of a human being—the power to act from within rather than be moved from without. Through this capacity, life asserts its own coherence, adjusting and anticipating in order to remain itself amid continual change.

In tracing how agency unfolds across scales—from molecular self-regulation to social coordination and reflective awareness—this essay reveals a continuity that joins biology, cognition, and culture. The same principles that govern cellular adaptation also underlie human deliberation: sensing, evaluating, and acting to sustain viable order. To understand agency in this broader sense is to see that freedom is not an abstraction set apart from nature, but a refinement of it—life’s most intricate way of staying alive through meaning, intention, and care.

For the practitioner, scholar, or reflective mind, this insight carries a practical weight: to cultivate agency is to refine the balance between inner order and outer engagement—between the self that perceives and the world that responds. It is the art of alignment: living coherently, responsively, and awake within the dynamic field of life itself.

The Living Logic of Action
Agency is autonomy in motion—the outward realization of life’s internal coherence through purposeful engagement with the world. It appears across the continuum of living systems, from the adaptive behaviors of single cells to the reflective actions of human beings. What changes across this spectrum is not the essence of agency but its dimensional depth—the sophistication with which organisms integrate perception, regulation, memory, and anticipation to sustain viability.[1] Across these levels, agency amplifies through recursive feedback and emergent coordination: lower-level regulatory systems provide the scaffolding for higher-order forms of autonomous action. Each tier elaborates the same organizing principle introduced earlier—the capacity to act in ways that preserve internal coherence amid continual flux and constraint in a dynamic world.

Cellular and Minimal Agency
At the most basic scale, cellular systems exhibit goal-directed self-regulation. Cells monitor gradients of nutrients, toxins, and signaling molecules, adjusting motility, metabolism, and gene expression to maintain internal balance.[2] Similar coordination occurs in non-neural adaptive systems such as plant tropisms and immune responses, where regulation unfolds without centralized command.[3] These processes reveal a primitive yet genuine form of agency: they are not externally dictated reactions but internally coordinated adjustments that preserve viability. Research in molecular biology and bio-cybernetics shows that even bacterial chemotaxis depends on feedback networks that compare past and present concentrations, effectively computing relative change to guide movement and sustain orientation.[4] Such behavior demonstrates that minimal agents do not merely respond to stimuli——they appraise and evaluate relevance through temporal comparison.

From Organisms to Anticipatory Minds
At higher levels of organization, multicellular organisms integrate neural, endocrine, and immune systems into unified behavioral repertoires. These networks coordinate energy allocation, threat detection, and recovery, enabling flexible responses across contexts.[5] Because action consumes energy and exposes organisms to risk, every expression of agency entails metabolic investment and defensive regulation.[6]

Neuroscientific work on predictive processing demonstrates that vertebrate brains operate as generative, error-correcting models, continually forecasting sensory input and updating behavior to minimize surprise or error.[7] In this way, anticipatory control embodies an implicit evaluative logic: prediction errors signal departures from viable conditions, guiding corrective action toward adaptive norms.[8] This dynamic parallels what cognitive scientists describe as relevance realization—the ongoing process by which an agent discerns what matters within a field of possibilities, selectively attending to information and affordances that sustain coherence and reduce expected loss.[9]

Through this continual attunement to significance, living systems enact a form of embodied valuation that scales naturally from perception to reflection. Recent research formalizes this link between active inference, homeostatic regulation, and value representation, showing that organisms act to reduce expected loss relative to their own goals.[10] Here, agency acquires both temporal depth and normative orientation.

Collective and Cooperative Agency
In social animals, agency becomes distributed, reciprocal, and cooperative. Communication, imitation, and role differentiation enable groups to integrate regulatory networks, collectively maintaining shared safety and resource stability. Comparative research in behavioral ecology shows how coordinated vigilance, alarm calls, and defensive formations function as emergent, group-level adaptations that extend both individual and collective survival.[11] Such collective behaviors meet the same functional criteria of agency—shared information processing, dynamic coordination, and feedback-driven regulation oriented toward the maintenance of relational coherence and group viability.

Human Agency: The Reflective Continuum
Human agency represents the most complex and reflexive expression of this continuum. It retains the same biological foundations—perception–action coupling, predictive regulation, and defensive maintenance—but extends and amplifies them through conscious awareness, symbolic language, and cumulative culture. Neural integration supports self-modelling and reflection; linguistic exchange enables coordination of goals and values; and cultural learning provides conceptual scaffolds for deliberation and moral reasoning.[12]

Functional neuroimaging links these integrative capacities to frontoparietal control systems and default-mode networks that coordinate perception, action, and value representation across time.[13] Human agents construct predictive models not only of the world but of themselves, linking past, present, and future states into coherent narratives that guide choice and sustain identity.[14] Through reflective awareness, humans evaluate not only outcomes but also the relevance, reasons, and norms that justify them—realizing significance at both cognitive and ethical levels.[15]

Predictive–social–cognitive research shows that such norm alignment is scaffolded by shared inference and cooperative modelling—thinking with and through other minds rather than in isolation.[16] Human agency may therefore be defined as the capacity for anticipatory, self-reflective, relevance-realizing, and norm-guided action, enabled by biological regulation yet extended through consciousness, language, and culture.

Continuity and Fragility of Agency
Across all scales, the essence remains constant: agency is autonomy in motion—the living system asserting, renewing, and coordinating its organization through purposeful exchange with the world. Yet at every level, this capacity is inherently contingent and fragile. The exercise of agency depends on the continuity, coherence, and integrity of its supporting conditions—bodily viability, energetic sufficiency, psychological stability, and social recognition. This interdependence becomes most pronounced in the human case, where autonomy endures only through the continual regulation of its biological, emotional, and relational foundations.

Conclusion: The Practice of Coherent Life
Agency, viewed across the scales of life, reveals a single logic expressed through many forms—the logic of coherence. From the cell that regulates its internal chemistry to the human being who reflects upon purpose and meaning, every act of agency is a gesture of self-organization: life asserting its form amid uncertainty. To act well, in this sense, is to act coherently—to align perception, intention, and response within the living rhythm of change.

Yet coherence is never static. It must be continually renewed through awareness, adjustment, and care. The more complex the organism, the more delicate this balance becomes. For human beings, whose agency depends upon reflection, empathy, rational evaluation, and social reciprocity, coherence must be cultivated consciously. It is not given by nature alone but sustained through practice—through disciplined movement, attentive perception, and moral discernment.

In the tradition of Northern Sage Kung Fu, this principle finds embodied expression. Training refines awareness of the body’s shifting centers, harmonizes inner regulation with outer timing, and transforms instinctive reaction into deliberate action. The martial tradition thus becomes a living meditation on agency itself: how to act without fragmentation, how to preserve order under pressure, and how to move with integrity within the dynamic flux of life.

To understand agency across scales is to glimpse the unity of these domains—biological, psychological, social and ethical. To live it is to practice coherence in motion: a way of being that joins strength with sensitivity, discipline with openness, and action with understanding.

 

 

 

About The Author

Nathan A. Wright
Nathan is the Managing Director and Chief Instructor at Northern Sage Kung Fu Academy, and Chief Representative of Luo Guang Yu Seven Star Praying Mantis in Canada and China. With over 25 years of experience living in China, he is deeply committed to passing on traditional martial arts in its most sincere form. As part of his passion Nathan regularly writes on related topics of self-defense, combat, health, philosophy, ethics, personal cultivation, and leadership. Email Nathan if you have questions on this article, or if you have interest in learning more about studying traditional Seven Star Praying Mantis Kung Fu.

 

 

 

End Notes
[1] Di Paolo, E., T. Buhrmann, and X. E. Barandiaran. 2017. “Sensorimotor Life: An Enactive Proposal.” Adaptive Behavior 25 (3): 151–164.
[2] Baluška, F., and M. Levin. 2016. “On the Agency of Cells: Information Processing, Decision-Making, and Self-Other Discrimination.” BioEssays 38 (10): 1003–1012.
[3] Calvo, P., and A. Trewavas. 2020. “Plant Cognition and Behavior.” Annual Review of Plant Biology 71: 559–583.
[4] Keijzer, F., and M. van Duijn. 2021. “Minimal Cognition in the Wild.” Biology & Philosophy 36 (5): 45.
[5] McEwen, B. S., and P. J. Gianaros. 2018. “Central Role of the Brain in Stress and Adaptation: Allostasis, Homeostasis, and Resilience.” Physiology 33 (3): 185–197.
[6] Sterling, P., and S. B. Laughlin. 2015. “Principles of Neural Design.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112 (12): 3499–3506.
[7] Friston, K., T. Parr, and B. de Vries. 2017. “The Graphical Brain: Active Inference and Markov Blankets.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 21 (10): 875–888.
[8] Bruineberg, J., J. Kiverstein, and E. Rietveld. 2018. “The Anticipating Brain: Towards a New Framing of Active Inference.” Synthese 199 (3–4): 1–28.
[9] John Vervaeke, “Relevance Realization and the Emerging Framework in Cognitive Science,” Journal of Mind and Behavior 34, nos. 3–4 (2013): 107–130; Evan Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Michael D. Kirchhoff and Tom Froese, “Where There Is Life There Is Mind: In Support of a Strong Life–Mind Continuity Thesis,” Entropy 19, no. 4 (2017): 169.
[10] Pezzulo, G., F. Rigoli, and K. Friston. 2021. “Active Inference and the Representation of Goals.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 25 (1): 71–84.
[11] Wilson, D. S., and E. Sober. 2014. “Multilevel Selection and Major Transitions in Evolution.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111 (Suppl. 2): 8363–8370.
[12] Christoff, K., A. Gordon, J. Smallwood, R. Smith, and E. M. Schooler. 2016. “The Role of Integration in Human Cognition.” Neuron 91 (5): 957–971.
[13] Smallwood, J., and J. W. Schooler. 2015. “The Science of Mind Wandering: Empirically Navigating the Stream of Consciousness.” Annual Review of Psychology 66: 487–518.
[14] Tulving, E., and M. Corballis. Referenced concepts from Chapter 2
[15] Heyes, C. M. 2018. “Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 373 (1756): 20170051.
[16] Veissière, S. P. L., A. Constant, M. J. D. Ramstead, K. Friston, and L. J. Kirmayer. 2020. “Thinking Through Other Minds: A Variational Approach to Social Cognition.” Physics of Life Reviews 33: 88–102.