Do you have any cached thoughts on the matter of “ontological inertia” of abstract objects? That is:
We usually think about abstract environments in terms of DAGs. In particular, ones without global time, and with no situations where we update-in-place a variable. A node in a DAG is a one-off.
However, that’s not faithful to reality. In practice, objects have a continued existence, and a good abstract model should have a way to track e. g. the state of a particular human across “time”/the process of system evolution. But if “Alice” is a variable/node in our DAG, she only exists for an instant...
The model in this post deals with this by assuming that the entire causal structure is “copied” every timestep. So every timestep has an “Alice” variable, and Alice(t+1) is a function of Alice(t) plus some neighbours...
But that’s not right either. Structure does change; people move around (acquire new causal neighbours and lose old ones) and are born (new variables are introduced), etc.
I think we want our model of the environment to be “flexible” in the sense that it doesn’t assume the graph structure gets copied over fully every timestep, but that it has some language for talking about “ontological inertia”/one variable being an “updated version” of another variable. But I’m not quite sure how to describe this relationship.
At the bare minimum, Alice(t+1) it has to be of same “type” as Alice(t) (e. g., “human”), be directly causally connected to Alice(t), Alice(t+1)‘s value has to be largely determined by Alice(t)’s value… But that’s not enough, because by this definition Alice’s newborn child will probably also count as Alice.
Or maybe I’m overcomplicating this, and every variable in the model would just have an “identity” signifier baked-in? Such that ID(Alice(t))=ID(Alice(t+1))≠ID(any-other-var(t+1))?
Going up or down the abstraction levels doesn’t seem to help either. (Alice(t) isn’t necessarily an abstraction over the same set of lower-level variables as Alice(t+1), nor does she necessarily have the same relationship with the higher-level variables.)
Back to my question: do you have any cached thoughts on that?
Do you have any cached thoughts on the matter of “ontological inertia” of abstract objects? That is:
We usually think about abstract environments in terms of DAGs. In particular, ones without global time, and with no situations where we update-in-place a variable. A node in a DAG is a one-off.
However, that’s not faithful to reality. In practice, objects have a continued existence, and a good abstract model should have a way to track e. g. the state of a particular human across “time”/the process of system evolution. But if “Alice” is a variable/node in our DAG, she only exists for an instant...
The model in this post deals with this by assuming that the entire causal structure is “copied” every timestep. So every timestep has an “Alice” variable, and Alice(t+1) is a function of Alice(t) plus some neighbours...
But that’s not right either. Structure does change; people move around (acquire new causal neighbours and lose old ones) and are born (new variables are introduced), etc.
I think we want our model of the environment to be “flexible” in the sense that it doesn’t assume the graph structure gets copied over fully every timestep, but that it has some language for talking about “ontological inertia”/one variable being an “updated version” of another variable. But I’m not quite sure how to describe this relationship.
At the bare minimum, Alice(t+1) it has to be of same “type” as Alice(t) (e. g., “human”), be directly causally connected to Alice(t), Alice(t+1)‘s value has to be largely determined by Alice(t)’s value… But that’s not enough, because by this definition Alice’s newborn child will probably also count as Alice.
Or maybe I’m overcomplicating this, and every variable in the model would just have an “identity” signifier baked-in? Such that ID(Alice(t))=ID(Alice(t+1))≠ID(any-other-var(t+1))?
Going up or down the abstraction levels doesn’t seem to help either. (Alice(t) isn’t necessarily an abstraction over the same set of lower-level variables as Alice(t+1), nor does she necessarily have the same relationship with the higher-level variables.)
Back to my question: do you have any cached thoughts on that?