There are competing networks in the brain, that if disregulated can form agents

There are competing networks in the brain, that if disregulated can form agents (schizophrenia). But Minsky’s society of mind was sort of an overstatement. But there are not multiple agents in the body. There is indeed an escalation path from the spine, to the brain stem, to the thalamus to the cingulate cortex, to the voluntary release of action by the prefrontal cortex. But there is no agency down there in the spine other than reflexes.
The hippocampal AC3 auto association region keeps alive a continuous stream of associations and recursive associations through backpropagation, that cause parallel predictions (computations), that compete for attention. And thinking consists of holding open some set of networks from the prefrontal cortex and then focusing on recursively associating in that newtwork, essentially navigating as if you were moving your body through space – which is where that ability evolved from.

Reply addressees: @Gyeff0 @TheAiGrid