I see your perspective about the inevitability of death causing a forcing-function directedness for agents, but that's a much much weaker claim than (emphasis mine):

> In the natural world, agency is a consequence of death: by dying, the feedback loop closes in a powerful way.

My original question was why could agency not exist without death, not why it was hampered without it. For clarity, I'm coming at from an analytic philosophy angle, not its more rhetorical counterpart that I struggle to wrap my head around.

I don't really view death or evolution as a necessity for agency. Nebulous AGI predictions aside: if a self-aware, conscious and intelligent being, capable of affecting consequential changes to its environment, becomes functionally immortal, it doesn't somehow lose its agency. I'd actually go further and say losing the forcing function of inevitable death is the biggest freedom a species can aim for. Without it, our agency is limited to solving problems of survival, in one form or another.

The existence of death is ultimately arbitrary and random, as random as our existence in the first place. The "direction" we get for evolution as a result of it, is another random function on top, also taking: the random circumstances the soup of organic molecules live in, as another parameter. Only once this random inevitability is conquered can we truly shape our lives and environments in ways that are a true reflection of who we are. Only then are we genuinely free. And "agency" without freedom is impotent at best.

(Addendum: I know positing "Immortality is good actually" can cause negative associations with "billionaires who want to cryopreserve themselves". This association has melded with the general romanticization of death in various philosophical and religious beliefs that has existed since millennia, further empowering the distaste against trying to reverse aging and eventually remove death as moral goals. While I personally have no plans (or means) to cryopreserve myself when I get old, I do believe it's a goal worth fighting for. One of the more important ones, alongside ensuring we have a planet to live on in the interim)

I love the discussion — thank you.

Your comment makes me more bullish on death. Death isn’t arbitrary as you claim: it is a direct expression of an entity in its environment, it epitomizes contextualization. (I argue that honoring context is the opposite of arbitrariness.)

Further, death encapsulates multiple layers of abstraction. When an entity dies, it dies on every level (eg both instincts and socially learned heuristics). The death reaches deep down inside the hierarchy of its own form to eliminate possibilities. That is some seriously strong directionality; it’s not like “taking your second left” or some other mono-dimensional vector. Layers and layers of genes and learning are discarded. It is truly an incredibly powerful feedback-loop closure.