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" )