I think you’re mildly overestimating the managedness of brains
Reading this made me realize an unfortunate connotation of the managedness language in that it evokes something like “(active) control”, whereas often such “managed processes” are not “really controlled” but more like doing their instrumentally-useful-for-super-goal-X thing, because they’ve been selected to do so (in the Selection vs Control terminology).
sequential change-out of the goal slot might certainly be one of the things going on, but does not feel to me like the only thing, I definitely feel like lower level drives are separate voters that talk to each other
I think I agree? The claim I’m making is that lower-level drives voting etc mostly doesn’t involve stuff characterizing agency, like modeling things somewhat explicitly, predicting, planning, etc. Or maybe it’s better to say that it involves much less (IDK, 3 OoMs less?) of that sort of stuff, than the proper human agency happening in the global workspace or whatever.[1]
Saying this partly not to be somewhat inconsistent mysefl, as I sometimes talk about e.g. bacteria as agents and I presume bacteria have less of “agency juice” than what you call lower-level drives.
Reading this made me realize an unfortunate connotation of the managedness language in that it evokes something like “(active) control”, whereas often such “managed processes” are not “really controlled” but more like doing their instrumentally-useful-for-super-goal-X thing, because they’ve been selected to do so (in the Selection vs Control terminology).
I think I agree? The claim I’m making is that lower-level drives voting etc mostly doesn’t involve stuff characterizing agency, like modeling things somewhat explicitly, predicting, planning, etc. Or maybe it’s better to say that it involves much less (IDK, 3 OoMs less?) of that sort of stuff, than the proper human agency happening in the global workspace or whatever.[1]
Saying this partly not to be somewhat inconsistent mysefl, as I sometimes talk about e.g. bacteria as agents and I presume bacteria have less of “agency juice” than what you call lower-level drives.