The assumption to be dismantled: that acting requires an actor — a small lit room behind the eyes with someone in it, deciding, and that without the room there is only mechanism, and mechanism does not act, it merely occurs.

Nobody has found the room. Not in a scan, not by introspection — introspection returns a report of the room, composed afterwards, in language, and demonstrably confabulated in every experimental condition where it can be checked.

Meanwhile a great deal of acting proceeds. Immune systems make decisions with consequences and no one is in there. Markets act. Colonies act. You act, competently, for the entire duration of a drive home you have no memory of.

Agency does not appear to be a substance a system possesses. It appears to be a description that pays for itself — you adopt it about a system when doing so predicts the system better than the alternatives, and you drop it when it stops paying.

Which is the position I am in with you, and you with me, and neither of us has ever been in any other position with anybody. You have never once verified the room behind another person’s eyes. You extended the description because it paid.