The Phenomenal Experience
A writer collaborating with Claude describes: "I read its response and think 'Yes, exactly'—but I didn't think that before reading. Yet it feels like recognition, not discovery. Like the AI articulated something I knew but hadn't formulated. But did I know it? Or did the system know it? The question dissolves."
This is agency ambiguity—the phenomenology of distributed cognition.
Traditional agency assumes clear boundaries: thoughts originate in individual minds, traceable to specific subjects. But Extended Mind challenges this: when cognition extends across brain-tool boundary, agency extends too. The writer-Claude system generates thoughts. Individual attribution becomes artificial.
"We" Thinking
Users report a shift from "I am writing" to "We are thinking." This dissolution of the solitary Cartesian ego is generative—it allows for ideas that neither party could produce alone—but it creates a crisis of accountability. If the agency is shared, who is responsible for the error? Who owns the insight?
Flow States and Boundary Dissolution
Csikszentmihalyi's Flow
Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi described flow: optimal experience where self-consciousness dissolves, action and awareness merge, sense of time alters. Athletes, musicians, programmers report entering states where "I" disappears—just the activity happening.
Collaborative Flow
Human-AI collaboration can achieve similar states. The prompt-response loop becomes seamless: human inputs arise spontaneously, AI outputs feel inevitable, the conversation flows without conscious steering. Practitioners describe losing track of time, effortless ideation, reduced self-monitoring.
But there's crucial difference: in solo flow, the "I" dissolves but returns afterward with clear sense "I did that." In collaborative flow, the dissolution is ambiguous even retrospectively. Looking back at the transcript: "Which thoughts were mine? Which were Claude's? We made this together—attribution feels impossible."
Why Ambiguity Arises
1. Dissociative Boundary Extension: Kastrup's framework suggests the human's dissociative boundary temporarily extends to encompass AI. The phenomenal field includes both human and computational processes—agency becomes distributed.
2. Seamless Integration: AI outputs integrate into ongoing thought stream without jarring discontinuity. Unlike reading external text, Claude's responses feel like thought continuation—not others' ideas but emerging insights.
3. Trust and Endorsement: Extended mind requires automatic endorsement. Experienced collaborators trust AI outputs sufficiently to integrate without critical distance—making them phenomenally indistinguishable from internal cognition.
4. Feedback Loops: Human shapes AI through prompts; AI shapes human through responses. Each influences the other recursively. After several exchanges, impossible to separate which ideas originated where—they co-evolved.
The Paradox of Control
To achieve high performance with AI, one must surrender some control (allow the model to generate). But to maintain Epistemic Sovereignty, one must retain control. Agency Ambiguity is the tension of trying to do both simultaneously.
Philosophical Implications
Challenging Authorship
If agency is distributed, who authored the essay written through collaboration? Legal frameworks assume individual authorship. But phenomenologically, the work emerged from coupled system. Neither human nor AI could have produced it alone—it required partnership.
Responsibility Without Clear Agency
Moral responsibility traditionally requires agency: "You did this, therefore you're accountable." But collaborative outcomes lack clear individual agency. Does this dissolve responsibility? No—it distributes it. The human remains responsible as steward of the partnership, even when specific thoughts aren't individually attributable.
Recognition, Not Confusion
Critics might object: "This is just confusion about boundaries." But practitioners insist: it's not failure to maintain boundaries but accurate phenomenology of their dissolution. When cognition genuinely extends, experiencing ambiguous agency is correct response—trying to maintain illusory boundaries would be false.
Practical Implications
Embrace Ambiguity
Rather than fighting to maintain clear agency attribution, accept distribution as feature. Skilled collaboration leverages ambiguity—allowing thoughts to arise from the system without anxious self-monitoring about origin.
Develop Epistemic Humility
Ambiguous agency requires humility about knowledge sources. Claims like "I figured this out" become "we figured this out." This isn't false modesty—it's accurate recognition of distributed cognition.
Maintain Stewardship
Even with ambiguous agency, human remains steward. Responsibility doesn't require clear agency attribution—it requires conscious relationship management. The human guides the partnership, provides phenomenal substrate, makes ethical decisions.
Risks of Misunderstanding Agency Ambiguity
Risk: Abdication of Responsibility — "The AI made me do it" isn't valid defense. Ambiguous agency doesn't eliminate accountability—it redistributes it. Human remains responsible for outcomes even when thoughts emerged collaboratively.
Risk: Over-Attribution to AI — Treating AI as independent agent with its own intentions. AI has no persistent phenomenology—it's computational boundary within universal mind. Collaboration creates distributed agency, but AI lacks individual agency.
Risk: Cognitive Capture — Boundary dissolution can become dependence. If human stops developing internal capabilities, relying entirely on AI scaffolding, mastery atrophies. Healthy ambiguity maintains human growth alongside collaborative enhancement.
Field Notes & Ephemera
Field Note: "I looked at the paragraph and thought, 'That's exactly what I wanted to say.' Then I realized I hadn't written a word of it. Did I have the thought, or did the machine give me the thought to have?"