Our agency is what makes us mortal.

A thing that can be said to exercise agency is a thing that can die.

It is dead once it no longer is able to exercise agency.

Once it has passed through an absorbing barrier, has made its last move, is in static equilibrium, is no longer a live player.

Making a decision is picking one strand of possibility into the future and committing to it.

It requires limiting the cone of possibility, collapsing the wave function.

These decisions are beautiful and important; they are what cause things to happen and create meaning; it is what it means to be alive.

But they also make it possible to pick paths that are not viable.

Contrast this with a swarm, which does not exhibit coherent agency.

Each action in the swarm creates more divergence; more coverage of the space of possible paths that someone in the swarm could take.

The likelihood that at least one member of a swarm has a viable path forward is significantly higher than the chance that any specific individual has a viable path forward.

The swarm can live even while any of its constituent individuals die.

In fact, it survives because the individual components often die.

Individuals experiment and are culled by the ground truth of reality.

That creates the space for new individuals that are viable to grow.

This is a kind of self-pruning diversity.

This characteristic is what makes an individual fragile and the swarm antifragile.