A Matter of Time: Towards a General Theory of Agency

Agency is widely invoked in biology, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and philosophy, yet its organizational basis, its empirical thresholds, and the operational criteria that distinguish it from other teleonomic terminology remain unsettled. Building on temporally parametrized (F, A)-systems, we propose a multidimensional theory of biological agency grounded in relational biology, physical biosemiotics, and process ontology. Our central claim is that the precarious physical realization of self-reference is necessarily diachronic; constitutive constraints act, decay, and are regenerated over distinct characteristic timescales. By temporalizing organizational diagrams ordered by specified relation deletion, we obtain a structural partial order, rather than an evolutionary ladder, that distinguishes four defeasible conditions: autonomy as internal regeneration of constitutive constraints under material openness; goal-directedness as viability-biased maintenance; agency as endogenous anticipatory modulation of organism--environment coupling; and open-endedness as reconstruction of the variables, measurement relations, effectors, and norms through which future viability is defined. We translate these distinctions into a closure-sensitive mechanistic workflow and a provisional profile of operational signatures for semantic closure, measurement--control complementarity, anticipatory modulation, affordance reconstruction, syntactic open-endedness, and viability-corrected skill acquisition. Markov blankets and active inference are treated as derived modeling tools, while Bickhard's interactivism clarifies anticipatory error and normativity. Across chemical, cellular, multicellular, and artificial systems, our framework turns agency from an all-or-none attribution into a falsifiable, scale-explicit research program.