Agency
Not what we need to do to live, but what we are living for
Levin • Dreyfus • Bach • Vervaeke
A border collie and a pug are adopted together as puppies. On the way home the collie can hardly sit still: there will be running, chasing, catching. The pug tells him he is living in the past. Their ancestors chased things because they had to eat. These owners will feed them forever. He will never need to hunt.
Every day at the park, the collie runs as fast as he can. The pug sleeps in a lap in the sun. In old age, curled up together, the pug says: I was right. Not once in your life did you need to run. And the collie answers: "I was not running because that's what I needed to do to live. I was living to run."
Grant Sanderson opened his HackMIT keynote in 2026 with this parable. The pug's argument is about function: you run because running gets you food, so when the food is guaranteed, the running is pointless. The collie's answer is not a better argument about food. It says the running was never for something else.
Alignment asked how to get a machine to do what we actually want. This page turns the question around: do we do what we actually want, and where does that wanting come from? In Different Minds, wanting was the third difference between us and an LLM, after a body and time. This page is about that one.
The Pug Keeps Getting More Right
AI is the guaranteed food. Every year, more of what we did because we had to can be done for us: the email, the summary, the code, the first draft of almost anything. By the pug's logic, each of those is one less reason to run.
The usual answer is to talk about agency as drive: be proactive, act first, take the initiative. But that answer accepts the pug's frame. It treats agency as a way of getting things, and things can be got for us. If agency is only the power to produce results, the machines will soon have more of it than we do, and they will not need us to want anything.
So this page asks something earlier. Before we act, something has to matter enough to act for. Where does that come from, in a cell, in a dog, in you?
Caring at Every Scale
The biologist Michael Levin studies agency where most people would not look for it: in cells. His measure of an agent is not how much it can do, but how far its caring reaches.
"Every agent can be defined by the size of the largest goal it can pursue … the light cone measures what do you care about?" Michael Levin, on Theories of Everything
He calls it the cognitive light cone. A bacterium's reaches the sugar around it. The cells that build a salamander's limb reach for the shape of a whole limb: cut it off, and they rebuild it, then stop when it is done. A person's can reach a grandchild who has not been born.
The collie's takes in the whole park: the stick under the bench, the frisbee in the air, the voice calling his name. The pug's has drawn in to the lap. Neither is wrong about the food. They differ in how much of the world can reach them.
Levin finds the dark version in cancer. Cells fall out of the body's larger goal and shrink back to caring only for themselves. They are not more selfish, in his telling. Their selves have become smaller.
Michael Levin /people/michael-levin Studies how cells cooperate toward goals larger than any one of them What is agency? /questions/what-is-agency The open question beneath this page, from Dennett's intentional stance to Levin's cells Drawn, Not Pushed
If agency starts with caring, what does caring feel like from the inside? Mostly not like deciding. The collie does not weigh whether to chase the frisbee. It calls, and he is already running.
The philosopher Hubert Dreyfus spent his life on this, drawing on Heidegger. In the film Being in the World, his student and co-author Sean Kelly puts it in one sentence:
"When we're operating at our best, we're precisely not detached from the situation that we're involved in. Rather, we've opened ourselves up to being called to act in a certain way in the situation." Sean Kelly, in Being in the World
His example is the basketball player Bill Bradley, who on court seemed to look at nothing in particular, and was ready for whatever the play asked of him.
Most of life works this way, not only the big choices. Think of a few of your own: the cook who reaches for the salt before tasting, the friend who knows when to say nothing, the walk home that goes the long way because the light is good. None of these is a decision. Each is a world that has already been sorted by what you care about. Kelly's word for that sorting is commitment. What you have committed to decides, before you choose anything, what in the world is worth doing and what is beside the point.
Hubert Dreyfus /people/hubert-dreyfus Brought Heidegger's skilled coping to bear on what minds and machines can do 
Sean Dorrance Kelly /people/sean-kelly Dreyfus's student and co-author; the voice of being called to act in the film Lived from Inside the Story
But where does the commitment come from? The cognitive scientist Joscha Bach has an answer that sounds deflating at first: not from our sense of choosing.
"Consciousness is channeling the motivation that we have. It's not creating it." Joscha Bach, talking with John Vervaeke
That is the collie, exactly. His love of running is older than any reason he could give for it. And Bach goes further. On his account, the world we experience is a model the brain builds, and we are characters inside it, feeling what is written for us the way a character in a novel does. We are, in a sense, software the brain runs.
It would be easy to hear that as: so none of it is real. John Vervaeke, in the same conversation, refuses that ending, and he has thought about the word "real" as carefully as anyone. Asked whether some truths are better left undiscovered, he turns to his classroom. He asks the students in happy relationships to raise their hands, then asks whether they would want to know if their partner were cheating, even if knowing ended it. About 95 percent keep their hands up.
"In addition to whatever we desire we have a meta desire that what satisfies that desire is real in some fashion." John Vervaeke, talking with Joscha Bach
It is the old test of the experience machine, which he names there: plug in, and you will feel whatever you like for the rest of your life. Most people refuse. We do not only want the feeling of being loved. We want to be loved.
For Vervaeke, real is always a comparison. We know it the way a dreamer knows the dream was a dream: by waking into something larger. And what marks the larger thing is that it does not run out. A great poem, he says, speaks to you differently each time you come back to it across a life. Our sense of being in contact with reality, in his telling, is the sense of being in the presence of something that keeps disclosing more than we have grasped. And it changes whoever touches it. People can transform themselves to come into closer conformity with what is real, he says in the same answer, and that is what it means to grow wise. Seeing more of the real and becoming more real yourself are one movement.
That is why a guaranteed bowl of food does not answer the collie, and why a perfect feeling of running would not either. The run is not a feeling he is after. It is contact: the ground pushing back under his paws, a frisbee that never curves the same way twice, a park that always has more in it. Every run asks a little more of him, and over a life the running has made him what he is. What he wants is not to be fed, or to feel fed. It is the run itself, here, now, actually happening.
Joscha Bach /people/joscha-bach Models the mind as software the brain runs, and us as its characters 
John Vervaeke /people/john-vervaeke Asks what in the model is real, and why we need it to be Poetry Wakes You to Reality /videos/john-vervaeke-poetry-wakes-you-to-reality Vervaeke on contact with reality as inexhaustible, from 5:54 When the Food Is Guaranteed
So what does AI change? Not our capacity to care. It changes how often we are asked to.
You let a model write the birthday message. It is warmer than the one you would have written, and you never spent the minute remembering what she is like. The bug gets fixed, and you never had to understand it. The map knows the way, so you never learned the city, and its streets never became yours. None of these is a loss on its own. Each is a small thing that used to call you, and now does not.
Being in the World saw this before chat models existed: "One of the dangers of technology is it relieves us of the burden of having to develop skills." What the burden gave us was a reason to be drawn in. And meaning, the film argues, needs something that pushes back, something that is not simply us.
Nothing dramatic happens. The light cone just draws in.
The earlier episodes kept arriving at one line. What an agent can reach is yours to decide. The outermost ring around the model is you. The thinking cannot be handed off. Underneath all three: what makes a decision yours is that you care what it is for.
Living to Run
Sanderson tells the parable through his own work. Manim, the animation library behind 3Blue1Brown, began at a Stanford hackathon and was never meant to be a product. Over the past year, AI got good even at the parts he is expert in, and he had to ask why he was building it at all. For that one project he chose to go slower, because understanding why every pixel is the color it is was the point.
He refuses to make it a verdict on the pug, who might spend his freedom on poetry and mathematics. Both can live well. What he asks is that the choice be made on purpose: "Whatever choice you make, I just want to leave you being deliberate about it."
That is the question AI leaves at every door. Not what we need to do to live, now that so much is done for us, but what we are living for. If agency begins with what we care about, the next question is how we come to know what that is, and facts alone will not tell us. That is where this series goes next.
But that can wait. Somewhere a dog is crossing a park at full speed, for no reason he could give you, and none of it is for anything else. He is not running to live. He is living to run.
Key Takeaways
- The pug treats wanting as a means to food; the collie's running was never for something else
- AI makes the pug's logic stronger every year, so agency as productivity is the wrong defense
- Levin: an agent is as large as what it cares about, the reach of its light cone
- Dreyfus and Sean Kelly: at our best we are drawn, not pushed, and commitment sorts the world before we choose
- Bach: consciousness channels a drive older than itself, and we live inside the story; Vervaeke: we need what satisfies us to be real
- The risk is not less work but fewer things that reach us; the light cone draws in, and the question left is what we are living for
