Great comment, I just wanted to share a thought on my perception of the why in relation to the intentional stance.
Basically, my hypothesis that I stole from Karl Friston is that an agent is defined as something that applies the intentional stance to itself. Or, in other words, something that plans with its own planning capacity or itself in mind.
One can relate it to the entire membranes/boundaries discussion here on LW as well in that if you plan as if you have a non-permeable boundary, then the informational complexity of the world goes down. By applying the intentional stance to yourself, you minimize the informational complexity of modelling the world as you kind of define a recursive function that acts within its own boundaries (your self). You will then act according to this, and then you have a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy as the evidence you get is based on your map which has a planning agent in it.
(Literally self-fulfilling prophecy in this case as I think this is the “self”-loop that is talked about in meditation. It’s quite cool to go outside of it.)
Great comment, I just wanted to share a thought on my perception of the why in relation to the intentional stance.
Basically, my hypothesis that I stole from Karl Friston is that an agent is defined as something that applies the intentional stance to itself. Or, in other words, something that plans with its own planning capacity or itself in mind.
One can relate it to the entire membranes/boundaries discussion here on LW as well in that if you plan as if you have a non-permeable boundary, then the informational complexity of the world goes down. By applying the intentional stance to yourself, you minimize the informational complexity of modelling the world as you kind of define a recursive function that acts within its own boundaries (your self). You will then act according to this, and then you have a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy as the evidence you get is based on your map which has a planning agent in it.
(Literally self-fulfilling prophecy in this case as I think this is the “self”-loop that is talked about in meditation. It’s quite cool to go outside of it.)
Can you give a link to wherever Friston talks about that definition of agency?
Uh, I binged like 5 MLST episodes with Friston, but I think it’s a bit later in this one with Stephen Wolfram: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3Xk8yFWii47wnbXaaR5Jwr?si=NMdYu5dWRCeCdoKq9ZH_uQ
It might also be this one: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0NibQiHqIfRtLiIr4Mg40v?si=wesltttkSYSEkzO4lOZGaw
Sorry for the unsatisfactory answer :/