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Decentralized Lawfulness: A Conceptual Framework for Emergent Agency

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This paper develops Nomological Foundations of Emergent Agency as a conceptual framework for relating micro-level lawfulness, macro-level organization, and emergent human agency within a single layered ontological picture. The proposal is a philosophical framework designed to clarify how locally governed interactions can be conceptually linked to large-scale order and, under suitable organizational conditions, to reason-responsive agency. A central aim of the paper is to prevent category confusion in cross-domain discussions that move too quickly between physics, consciousness, and free will. To this end, the paper introduces a restricted notion of particle-level Computational Description of Dispositional Properties, defined as locally instantiated lawful state-evolution and interaction responsiveness, and explicitly distinguished from phenomenal consciousness. Through a state-space formalization, the paper argues that human agency is more coherently treated as an emergent higher-order capacity involving representation, evaluation, and selfregulation, rather than as a suspension of physical law. The framework is situated within an emergentist-compatibilist interpretation of free will, offering a disciplined interdisciplinary vocabulary for distinguishing local lawfulness, emergent organization, and agential capacities without collapsing them into one another.
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2026-04-09
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