To Throw a Stone with Six Birds: On Agents and Agenthood

Abstract

Six Birds Theory (SBT) treats macroscopic objects as induced closures rather than primitives. Empirical discussions of agency often conflate persistence (being an object) with control (making a counterfactual difference), which makes agency claims difficult to test and easy to spoof. We give a type-correct account of agency within SBT: a theory induces a layer with an explicit interface and ledgered constraints; an agent is a maintained theory object whose feasible interface policies can steer outside futures while remaining viable. We operationalize this contract in finite controlled systems using four checkable components: ledger-gated feasibility, a robust viability kernel computed as a greatest fixed point under successor-support semantics, feasible empowerment (channel capacity) as a proxy for difference-making, and an empirical packaging map whose idempotence defect quantifies objecthood under coarse observation. In a minimal ring-world with toggles for repair, protocol holonomy, identity staging, and operator rewriting, matched-control ablations yield four separations: calibrated null regimes with single actions show zero empowerment and block model-misspecification false positives; enabling repair collapses the idempotence defect; protocols increase empowerment only at horizons of two or more steps; and learning to rewrite operators monotonically increases median empowerment (0.73 to 1.34 bits). These results provide hash-traceable tests that separate agenthood from agency without making claims about goals, consciousness, or biological organisms, and they are accompanied by reproducible, audited artifacts.