Is there any problem with it? That's just how the language works. In many of the contexts and on many of the logical levels the body does indeed have agency: th

Is there any problem with it? That's just how the language works. In many of the contexts and on many of the logical levels the body does indeed have agency: the linguistic expression embedded in agency terms and all related expressions are just the most accurate and compressed and useful descriptions of phenomena we are studying. They have all the useful connotations and sub-meanings that help the process of expanding knowledge forward. All I see in those terms is best possible ways to explain the actual found relationships between parts of the immune system, instead of some description of meaningless facts or chemical reactions. If you insist on being on some imaginary laplace daemon lowest level of interaction with the world, maybe theoretically you could escape the agency component (but even then you have problems with questions like "what makes all particles interact with each other at all"), but nobody lives on that level anyway. Just because in some distant theory it is possible to reduce everything to interaction of some miriad of particles with exactly known states and rules, it doesn't mean that you (or other human or society) can effictively and practically compute anything of value on that level of abstraction. Nobody interacts with life on that level. No useful discussions are had on that level in most of the scientific pursuits. This is a matter of using the language effectively, not a matter of superstition. I don't see scientists cargo culting the immune system or organs of the body. Think about it like this: if I'm programming in Python, I'm going to think about variables, scopes and closures, not about high and low voltage levels or number of silicon atoms in my processor. A closure is not an illusion just because there is no transistor that specifically makes it work, a closure is still the most useful term on it's own level of abstraction. (Recommended reading: Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, also known as GEB, a 1979 book by Douglas Hofstadter)