The Strange Universe of Agents: Is the Universe Made of Agents?

Abstract

Ask which things in the universe are agents and the usual answers arrive as a list with a boundary drawn somewhere convenient. This paper takes the question seriously enough to derive the boundary rather than draw it, and the derivation produces a surprise: agency turns out to be a graded property of everything, with the interesting work done by measuring where each system sits rather than by deciding which side of a line it falls on. A system is a bounded region with a state and a transition structure, individuated by an asymmetry of influence that is measurable rather than stipulated. An agent is a system that sustains a distinction structure at thermodynamic cost, where a distinction is a difference the system resolves differently and sustaining it requires continuous entropy export. Agency is reported as a six-component vector covering boundary persistence, distinction depth, and related measures that make the graded claim empirically usable.