To Throw a Stone with Six Birds: On Agents and Agenthood
This work addresses the challenge of distinguishing agenthood from agency in empirical discussions, providing testable criteria without relying on goals or consciousness, though it is incremental in its formalization.
The paper tackles the problem of defining and testing agency by proposing a formal account within Six Birds Theory, operationalizing it with checkable components and demonstrating separations in a minimal ring-world, such as learning to rewrite operators increasing median empowerment from 0.73 to 1.34 bits.
Six Birds Theory (SBT) treats macroscopic objects as induced closures rather than primitives. Empirical discussions of agency often conflate persistence (being an object) with control (making a counterfactual difference), which makes agency claims difficult to test and easy to spoof. We give a type-correct account of agency within SBT: a theory induces a layer with an explicit interface and ledgered constraints; an agent is a maintained theory object whose feasible interface policies can steer outside futures while remaining viable. We operationalize this contract in finite controlled systems using four checkable components: ledger-gated feasibility, a robust viability kernel computed as a greatest fixed point under successor-support semantics, feasible empowerment (channel capacity) as a proxy for difference-making, and an empirical packaging map whose idempotence defect quantifies objecthood under coarse observation. In a minimal ring-world with toggles for repair, protocol holonomy, identity staging, and operator rewriting, matched-control ablations yield four separations: calibrated null regimes with single actions show zero empowerment and block model-misspecification false positives; enabling repair collapses the idempotence defect; protocols increase empowerment only at horizons of two or more steps; and learning to rewrite operators monotonically increases median empowerment (0.73 to 1.34 bits). These results provide hash-traceable tests that separate agenthood from agency without making claims about goals, consciousness, or biological organisms, and they are accompanied by reproducible, audited artifacts.