I agree the core of the threatening part of situational awareness (and also a large part of why it’s useful/effective) is reliable self-location.
I don’t think you need the slightly mystical, metaphysical baggage for this to be important. A cybernetic frame suffices. A decision-making procedure is implemented on some particular substrate, its inputs/percepts are mediated via some particular sensors, its outputs feed into some particular actuators etc. You can have generic, space/time/other-invariant knowledge of world dynamics, you can have historical/biographical/etc knowledge of particulars and their relationships, and you can have local knowledge about ‘self’ and immediate environment (and how all that fits together). For a ‘natural’ reasoner, a lot of the local knowledge will come first (though a selected/adapted reasoner may well have some priors on the more self-invariant world knowledge preinstalled). Other approaches (notably LMs) might ingest primarily self-invariant world knowledge until some quite late stage of development.
I agree the core of the threatening part of situational awareness (and also a large part of why it’s useful/effective) is reliable self-location.
I don’t think you need the slightly mystical, metaphysical baggage for this to be important. A cybernetic frame suffices. A decision-making procedure is implemented on some particular substrate, its inputs/percepts are mediated via some particular sensors, its outputs feed into some particular actuators etc. You can have generic, space/time/other-invariant knowledge of world dynamics, you can have historical/biographical/etc knowledge of particulars and their relationships, and you can have local knowledge about ‘self’ and immediate environment (and how all that fits together). For a ‘natural’ reasoner, a lot of the local knowledge will come first (though a selected/adapted reasoner may well have some priors on the more self-invariant world knowledge preinstalled). Other approaches (notably LMs) might ingest primarily self-invariant world knowledge until some quite late stage of development.