I was in the Red
River Gorge a few months ago with some friends who had some magic
mushrooms. At some point during our “magic
carpet ride” I saw all of the trees and shrubs and other vegetation moving in
concert, like those old cartoons from the 1940’s and 50’s where the flowers and
trees danced to the background music, bending and swaying with awareness and
intent upon some foreground cartoon character.
Psychology and Philosophy have a term for this feeling. It is called agency. The feeling of agency is that of sensing that
our voluntary actions are being directed by us; that we are in control of
something we do.
The feeling of agency is distinguished from the
judgement of agency, where the judgement of agency is a higher level conceptual
process that arises in situations where we make explicit attributions of agency
to the self or others. In my mushroom experience I didn't conclude that the forest was acting with volitional intent. Rather, I felt its willful agency. So, perhaps we can at least in some circumstances, sense the agency of
another even if our feeling is illusory or a perceptual error. I can imagine the utility of this capability. It has
evolutionary significance. We need to
feel the agency of a growling tiger or other predator to direct our attention to
an immediate existential threat. Leaves
blowing in the wind would be a distraction if we routinely perceived them as
having agency. Yet, after a storm, a
tornado for example, that destroys our house but not our neighbors, we might
have some feeling of an agency to nature that selectively targets us (what did
we do wrong?)
My experience in the
woods, of having a feeling of agency where normally I would not, suggests that
this feeling is primal and like fear, anger, love and other feelings becomes
more refined as we mature and learn causal relationships, those before-after
scenarios that validate or refute our sense of agency for ourselves and
others, be they people, animals, plants or another natural phenomenon.
We recognize that
infants, toddlers and small children are frightened by many inanimate things,
things responded to as if they were believed to have agency. The feeling of agency informs the
small child that they cannot expect constancy from something, that it is
unpredictable. Paired with fear or other
negative emotions, they retreat or are more cautious around such things. While things that elicit pleasurable affect combined with a feeling of agency draw them closer to
someone or something.
I want to be clear
that while we may indeed use our cognitive capabilities to make attributions about agency, I believe there is also a feeling of agency that applies to “other” as well as
self. My sense of agency for the forest
was manifest in an altered state where the feeling took precedence over a set
of learned associations that would otherwise have inhibited the feeling or attenuated it in favor of a
more logical interpretation of my surroundings.
But I contend that the feeling represents something more fundamental about our nervous system, something which is present before we experience the world. Our subsequent experience then creates expectations which allow us to place our feelings within a particular context so that their expression is replaced or subdued by a more cognitive interpretation of our surroundings.
In this
way agency is at the core of our experience of reality. It is like the grain of sand that is
necessary for a pearl to form. We begin
with the feeling of agency for the world around us, it is all one sentient
being, and then we validate or refute our sense of agency as we encounter the
world around us. As we build neurological
networks that allow us to predict events, our sense of agency is diminished and the pearl of a more causal, logical framework serves as our experience of reality. Although the logical
framework ultimately becomes our most prevalent means of understanding the world, as with the pearl, it is the feeling of agency that
forms the seed from which the logical framework is constructed.
