Agentic Immortality Theory: The Transgenerational Persistence of Agency
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: This paper proposes Agentic Immortality Theory, a theoretical model describing how agency originating within a mortal Principal Agent may remain causally operative after that Principal ceases to exist. The theory distinguishes Internal Agency, in which both the provenance and motivational force of an operative objective originate within the agent, from Internalized Exogenic Agency, in which an externally originating objective becomes sufficiently incorporated into another agent's Reality Model that the receiving agent supplies the motivational force for its continued execution. This distinction separates the present location of motivation from the historical provenance of agency. The paper further distinguishes mnemonic persistence from causal persistence and introduces Agentic Provenance Decoupling to describe the condition in which the continuing causal operation of originating agency becomes functionally independent of the continuing existence of its Principal. Where such agency can be retransmitted, internalized, and reproduced through successive living carriers, it may achieve transgenerational causal persistence. The theory also examines Provenance Dispossession as a possible durability mechanism through which operative agency may continue even where subsequent carriers lose effective epistemic access to its mortal historical provenance. An engineering representation formalizes these relationships as a recursive process of externalization, transmission, internalization, causal operation, and retransmission. Agentic Immortality therefore relocates immortality from the persistence of the biological agent to the persistence of agency itself. Its central proposition is that the death of the Principal does not necessarily entail the death of the Principal's agency.
Author: Warman, Eric
Language: English
Subfield: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7224943487