ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a partial answer: Agents are globally organized patterns of activity. Guidance is a form of context-sensitive mutual constraint within an agential system. This is far from a complete account, but it frames the issue in a way that will allow me to advance a more detailed positive account in what follows. The chapter discusses ways in which the forms of interdependence found in complex systems may produce the sort of guidance needed for primitive action. The Russian physiologist Nicolai Bernstein viewed the cognitive task of behavior production as one of reducing redundancy in a system with an enormous number of degrees of freedom. Thelen and Smith's analysis of child reaching is but one of many dynamical analyses of coordinated behavior and such analyses frequently identify patterns common to the various complex systems.
