Awareness, Agency, and Emergence in Organisms and Purpose in Evolution

Wherever organisms engage in internal sign processing to represent and respond to their environment, subjective awareness and agency emerge. Through connectivity, they form structures from which “super-agents” with higher levels of awareness and agency can emerge. An increase in subjectivity is thus congruent with an increase in the processing of the physical world through animation. If there were a final end to the increase of agency and awareness in freedom and consciousness, this absolute would fully reflect physical causation in itself. In this picture, subjectivity is thus compatible with physical determinism and yet substantial because it posits causation as much as it is made by it.