To Throw a Stone with Six Birds: On Agents and Agenthood

TL;DR

This paper introduces a formal framework within Six Birds Theory to distinguish agenthood from agency, operationalizing it through measurable components in controlled systems and providing empirical tests to identify agents.

Contribution

It offers a novel, type-correct account of agency that separates object persistence from control, with practical implementation and reproducible experiments.

Findings

Null regimes show zero empowerment, indicating no agency.

Repair protocols reduce the idempotence defect, confirming objecthood.

Operator rewriting increases median empowerment, demonstrating learned control.

Abstract

Six Birds Theory (SBT) treats macroscopic objects as induced closures rather than primitives. Empirical discussions of agency often conflate persistence (being an object) with control (making a counterfactual difference), which makes agency claims difficult to test and easy to spoof. We give a type-correct account of agency within SBT: a theory induces a layer with an explicit interface and ledgered constraints; an agent is a maintained theory object whose feasible interface policies can steer outside futures while remaining viable. We operationalize this contract in finite controlled systems using four checkable components: ledger-gated feasibility, a robust viability kernel computed as a greatest fixed point under successor-support semantics, feasible empowerment (channel capacity) as a proxy for difference-making, and an empirical packaging map whose idempotence defect quantifies objecthood under coarse observation. In a minimal ring-world with toggles for repair, protocol holonomy, identity staging, and operator rewriting, matched-control ablations yield four separations: calibrated null regimes with single actions show zero empowerment and block model-misspecification false positives; enabling repair collapses the idempotence defect; protocols increase empowerment only at horizons of two or more steps; and learning to rewrite operators monotonically increases median empowerment (0.73 to 1.34 bits). These results provide hash-traceable tests that separate agenthood from agency without making claims about goals, consciousness, or biological organisms, and they are accompanied by reproducible, audited artifacts.