To act is to change one or more specific elements during a specific period.
An action is an act or activity which causes a specific change in an element during a specific period.
Active is a trait of an element which can potentially act within a specific context.
Actions can be classified by these primary types:
compound, create, destroy, damage, develop, emerge, modify, transform, transmute, transport, transmit, transfer, transact
The above types of action influence agents and/or resources in physical, social, cultural, economic and political contexts.
Agents may directly identify or be identified with "acts" or "actions" via functional roles in specific social contexts.
Action may be perceived vaguely and gradually or through discrete "quantum" shifts between the presence or absence of elements, forms or traits. Gradual action can be described by identifying intervals of time (or locations in spacetime during which specific action occurred.
Most actions and reactions can be clearly identified within a larger context of complex simultaneous interaction. However, agents rarely bother to thoroughly describe interactions, partly for these practical reasons:
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Agents, and many other complex adaptive systems, are closely related to regulation and repair systems which enable them to create significant action without deeply influencing their specific traits. (These regulating and repair systems may sometimes be distinguished as subsystems or as external support systems.)
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Many interactions occur between elements of such vastly different scales that it seems practically impossible-- and unimportant-- to identify significant changes in most of the interacting elements. For example, it’s unimportant (to humans, so far) to identify the influence of an accelerating automobile upon the velocity of the Earth, which technically does have an “equal and opposite” inertial reaction. Likewise, it’s unimportant to determine the microscopic (tidal) influence of the moon’s gravity upon a puddle.
On a closely related note, many abundant and easily accessed resources, such as oxygen for respiration, are generally taken for granted (assumed and ignored) by most if not all agents within specific contexts.