Agency as Emergent Self-Orchestration: A Deterministic, Feedback-Based Account Across Biological and Artificial Systems

This paper offers a compatibilist and emergentist philosophical account of agency as a graded, emergent capacity in complex deterministic systems. Agency is defined as the ability to act intentionally, pursue goals, and intervene in the world through reasons-responsive, goal-directed behavior. Rather than requiring contra-causal freedom, it arises when systems satisfy four structural conditions: statefulness (persistent internal configuration), embodiment or simulated embodiment with boundary-localized threats (genuine stakes and irreversibility), distributed cooperation among sub-agents (modular alignment for persistence), and centralized integration under selective pressure (coordinated unified action). The spectrum spans proto-agency in minimal feedback-driven entities (e.g., bacterial chemotaxis, autopoietic cells) to recursive reflective agency in humans, where conscious metacognition supervises subconscious scripts. The Functional Free Will Hypothesis (FFWH) provides the core mechanistic explanation: in deterministic systems governed by A = f(S, I), recursive feedback loops, particularly conscious awareness as a high-level supervisor—enable self-correction by scrutinizing outputs, dissecting discrepancies, restructuring prospective inputs via neuroplasticity and environmental reconfiguration, and updating future trajectories. This generates functional self-orchestration without rupturing causality; freedom becomes the deliberate enrichment of deterministic parameters for enhanced adaptability. Critiques are addressed: emergence is epistemically strong (practically irreducible due to complexity and computational irreducibility) though ontologically weak; functional agency is causally real via evolutionary utility; embodiment and stakes are necessary for robustness; the self-correction sequence is testable through awareness interventions; scope extends to non-human, more-than-human, and collective systems under explicit criteria; sense-of-agency simplifies subconscious processes but does not constitute actual agency. Philosophically, the account reconceives moral responsibility and autonomy as tied to recursive self-correction efficacy, preserving normative agency in deterministic worlds. Applied to AGI and bio-AI convergence, FFWH suggests design imperatives, embodiment, irreversible stakes, distributed alignment, recursive monitoring for robust, human-aligned functional agency, while highlighting risks of emergent misalignment in ungrounded systems.