About the meeting

Biology has been read for half a century as an information-processing story in which the organism is the output of its code and intelligence is downstream property. The Agential Biology Institute takes the opposite starting point: that agency is foundational rather than emergent, and that living systems bind meaning to their own physical circumstances in ways that may not be substrate-neutral.

At the same time, as we enter the “Agential era,” artificial intelligence faces an increasingly physical and conceptual bottleneck: rising energy demand, brittleness outside training distributions, weak embodiment, limited self-maintenance, and shallow integration with biological, material, and energetic constraints.

By abstracting computation away from physical reality, dominant systems risk missing the adaptive resilience, multiscale organisation, and self-maintaining properties of living systems.

This pre-conference gathers a small group of biologists, physicists, cyberneticians, philosophers and AI researchers to define the key questions: how meaning is bound in organismic intelligence, whether biology is reducible to fitness functions, what distinguishes computation programmed in silico from cognition in vivo, what paths to recursive self improvement and whether digital systems can bind meaning at all.

Convened in the spirit of the 1946-53 cybernetics conferences: small, cross-disciplinary, argumentative, and organized around shared definitional work rather than the presentation of finished results.

The aim is not to settle the questions but to establish the intellectual parameters of the field they define and to start to sketch a common ontological framework for deeper collaboration and progress.

We expect to leave with tractable proposals for how agency (in the organism and the machine) might actually be tested.