About the meeting

PLACEHOLDER TEXT 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 a late arrival. 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.

This pre-conference gathers a small group of biologists, physicists, cyberneticians, philosophers and AI researchers to ask what follows from that premise: how meaning is bound in organismic intelligence, whether biology is reducible to fitness functions, what distinguishes computation programmed in silico from computation running in vivo, and whether digital systems bind meaning at all. The aim is not to settle these questions but to establish the intellectual parameters of the field they define, and to leave with tractable proposals for how agency might actually be tested.

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