Learned helplessness appears when a person learns that their actions do not modify the outcome; it is not laziness or a lack of will. The session distinguishes adversity from uncontrollability and develops the components used to describe the capacity to act towards a goal.

The possibility of acting on the future changes with institutions, available permissions and forms of collective coordination, not only with individual conviction. The session traces historical transformations and reversals in the attribution of human action, without presenting progress as inevitable.

A system can retain all its parts and still stop solving the problem it exists to solve. The session introduces the TAME-quintuple framework, which describes any regulated system —a cell, an organ or a person— through five components and locates failure in information before machinery.

A set of parts can behave as a single agent or as a simple sum, and the difference is measurable. The session distinguishes agency from efficiency, examines what makes a collective perform better than the sum of its parts, and what can be observed when that gain is lost.