Causal Agency A Persistence Control Theory of Adaptive Systems

Agency is a central concept across philosophy of action, cognitive science, theoretical biol-ogy, and artificial intelligence. Despite extensive research across these fields, existing accountsremain theoretically fragmented because they are typically grounded in domain-specific mech-anisms and operate at different explanatory levels. Philosophical theories emphasize inten-tional action and rational deliberation, biological theories focus on metabolic self-maintenance,and computational models define agents primarily in terms of goal-directed decision processes.While each of these perspectives captures important aspects of agency, none provides a struc-tural account capable of explaining agency across the full spectrum of adaptive systems.This paper proposes a structural theory of agency based on a persistence–control frame-work. Within this framework, systems are interpreted as dynamical systems operating underconstraint structures that shape the possible trajectories of their states. Persistence is definedas the continued occupation of a viable region of state space that allows the system to main-tain its organization or functional identity. Agency emerges when the internal dynamics of asystem are capable of regulating or modifying the constraint structures that govern its ownpersistence.By defining agency in terms of constraint-modulating dynamics, the framework shifts theexplanation of agency away from particular biological, cognitive, or computational mechanismstoward the structural conditions that enable adaptive systems to regulate their own trajecto-ries. This perspective provides a domain-general account applicable to biological organisms,cognitive agents, and artificial systems. The paper develops the conceptual foundations of thepersistence–control framework, introduces a minimal formal representation, and analyzes itsrelationship to existing theories of biological autonomy, predictive processing, and artificialagency. It argues that agency should be understood as a graded structural phenomenon thatemerges through increasingly complex forms of persistence regulation across adaptive systems.Keywords: agency; dynamical systems; constraint dynamics; adaptive systems; biologicalautonomy; artificial intelligence