The Architecture of Agency

This paper develops a structural account of agency grounded in the interaction between curvature, orientation, and action. Curvature denotes the organism’s inherited and accumulated manifold of tendencies and constraints. Orientation is the system’s active stance toward its possibilities, enabling symmetry‑breaking among multiple viable trajectories. Action realizes orientation within constraint, and repeated action reshapes curvature, producing stable patterns that underlie identity. Meaning arises as the system interprets its own directedness across time, and selfhood emerges as the coherent pattern of orientations and interpretations that stabilizes through development. This framework dissolves the determinism–freedom divide by treating structure as the medium of agency rather than its negation, and it distinguishes genuine agency from the appearance of agency in artificial systems that lack self‑modifying curvature, internally generated orientation, and interpretive coherence.