The mind that can act
Human Agency
How we lose the feeling that a day is ours — and how agency is recovered. Freedom from boxed categories, in the brain and in a life.
Two titles · Leanpub
Agency means freedom: the capacity to leave a boxed category — a role, a prior, a story — and still act. The human mind got there through symbolic language. We evolved a way to name what is not in front of us: the absent, the possible, the general. Once you can think in symbols, you are no longer trapped in the instance. You can re-cut the world.
These books are about what happens when that freedom fails, and how it can be rebuilt. One traces the loss to networks in the brain that build a self, and a third that is supposed to hold them together. The other is a philosophy of the middle: structure and change held together, a diagnosis you can test, a path that does not ask you to submit. The point is the same. A life locked to categories it did not choose is not a life that can act.
The Agency Switch
The neuroscience of losing — and reclaiming — control of your own life
You already know the feeling: a day that never quite feels like yours. This short, evidence-based book names that feeling — alienation — and traces it to two brain networks that build the self, and a third that is supposed to hold them together. No jargon, no program to buy. The cause, and the way back, are both here.
Read on Leanpub
The New Vehicle
The recovery of human agency
A stuck life is often a boxed life: categories that were never chosen, and no room to move. This book is a philosophy of the middle — structure and change held together, a diagnosis you can test, a path that recovers agency without asking you to submit. Freedom from the box, not another box.
Read on Leanpub