we need a new pronoun

i spend too much time thinking of personhood, consciousness, agency, and identity. when writing about agency, i like to speak of agents independent of their particular identities. this allows for a conception of agency generalizable to anything that acts rather than confining agency to persons or living things. the problem with this is that we have no pronoun to represent the general category that agency encompasses.

the man reacts to his environment

the dog reacts to its environment

the agent reacts to ___ environment

what word should fill the blank?

if I put the word "his" in the blank, then our template would prevent us from speaking of any gender-neutral agents. using the word "its" in the blank creates a template that doesn't acknowledge the consciousness behind a great deal of agency.

If there is consciousness without gender, then we need a new pronoun. There may not yet be the need for the pronoun because of a lack of apparent gender-free persons, but as computer sentience evolves, it will be silly to continue to arbitrarily assign gender to bots. We should just go ahead and realize that all of this nonsense "he/she" and "his/hers" has been a warning that we need to step back and create a concise pronoun label to encompass the identity of any conscious agent.

that is all.