Rachel Armstrong (2024) advocates for a new approach to ‘agential chemistry’, a form of ‘new materialism’ that allows matter to take an active role. Here I comment on some of these ideas through a computational lens: the consequences if agential chemistry can perform computation to advance its own agenda; how it might provide the structure and dynamics needed for computation, and the metadynamics for open ended systems; and how it opens the possibility of a new technological discipline of engineering ‘persuadable’ agential matter.
@article(Stepney-2025,
author = "Susan Stepney",
title = "Engineering Persuadable Matter:
A Comment on Armstrong's 'Life, Mind and Matter'",
journal = "Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective",
volume = 14,
number = 3,
pages = {33-42},
year = 2025,
url = "https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-9Ff"
)