This paper challenges the foundational assumption pervading psychology, moral philosophy, legal attribution, and everyday social interaction: that each human organism is governed by a single agent. It argues that mono-agency is not a verified architectural description but a historically functional simplification — the constitutive narrative through which dual-agent organisms became socially intelligible to one another without perceiving their own internal architecture. The paper introduces DAVArch (Dual-Agent Vital Architecture) and the SSI model (SERbasal, SERsocial, Physical Interface) as an alternative framework. The human organism is described as governed by the continuous negotiation between two coupled evaluative agencies (SER — Sistema Enactor Relatador): a SERbasal, oriented toward biological continuity, adaptive regulation, and basal predispositions for socialization; and a SERsocial, oriented toward social coherence, identity, normativity, and relational continuity within a given lifespan trajectory. Mono-agency, in this account, is the simplified narrative interface through which the SERsocial negotiates without full access to the basal program. Observable decouplings — divergence between promise and behavior, declared attitude versus enacted choice, retrospective rationalization, endocrine modulation of decision-making, relational conflict, and split-brain phenomena — are reinterpreted not as failures of a single self but as expected outcomes of inter-agential misalignment. The paper contrasts DAVArch with moral-voluntarist, dynamic-intrapsychic, cognitive-executive, and predictive coding frameworks across multiple controversy families, showing that each reinscribes dual phenomena within a corrected mono-agential architecture rather than revising the assumption itself. The concept of cross-metacognition is proposed as the capacity through which life begins to observe its own operative architecture explicitly. Clinical, relational, and moral implications are developed, including a reinterpretation of pathology, guilt attribution, and therapeutic practice. Empirical pathways for testing the model are outlined, including endocrine correlates of inter-agential negotiation, non-verbal dissonance protocols, attitude-behavior divergence studies, and reinterpretation of split-brain findings.
Guevara et al. (Thu,) studied this question.