Theory of Functional Agency: Redefining Agency via Operational System Dynamics

[Abstract]This paper redefines the concept of "Agency"—which has long been conflated with psychological attributes such as "consciousness" or "intention," or biological structures—from a functional perspective, formulating an axiomatic system of "Functional Agency" as a universal framework. This paper frames agency not as a static property, but as an "operating process" in interaction with the external environment, proposing three axioms (Boundary Maintenance, Internally Initiated Discriminative Connection, and Irreversible State Change) as necessary and sufficient conditions independent of hardware implementation or internal intelligence. By introducing this axiomatic framework, "Functional Agency" is explicitly decoupled from "Intelligence" and "Communicability," making it possible to objectively position the operation itself that undergoes irreversible structural updates with the environment as an "agent," even for systems lacking high-level cognitive capabilities or communicability with human observers. This paper has a complementary relationship with the parallel paper, Theory of Coupled Entity Life, which addresses the dynamics of how these single-cycle operations continuously couple and exert effective control over space, with the present paper presenting the micro-level operating process. [Japanese Title]