I only vaguely understand both Cartesian frames and «boundaries», but I want to take a shot at explaining what feels to me like some confusions in this post. Also a bunch of this might be invalidated by your disclaimer that this post was published before the final version of Crtich’s boundaries sequence.
It seems to me that your work in Cartesian frames is about finding an ontology in which we can make progress on agent foundations in general, whereas Critch’s concept of boundaries is about formalizing a necessary condition for identifying when an agent exists in a particular system.
While every boundary can be recast as a frame, the converse is not also true.
Indeed! We wouldn’t want a theory of agents (or boundaries) to be applicable to a state in thermal equilibrium, for example, whereas we definitely want our ontology to be able to handle it.
Getting Past the Physical Frame
This whole section is actually a little confusing. It sounds like you’re interpreting Critch’s sequence to be saying that boundaries are inherently physical. But aren’t all the definitions in terms of information theory? The nodes in the network are course-grained, but aren’t we free to decide what about the world the are abstracted from?
This also further motivates frames over boundaries, as we might want to reason about multiple different frames simultaneously with no underlying factorization that multiplicatively-refines both of them.
It seems entirely possible to me for a formalization of boundaries to allow for two different but equally-valid boundaries to be drawn within the state.
Actually, now that I think about it, is there any reason that Critch’s definition of boundaries isn’t fully compatible with the ontology of factored sets?
I only vaguely understand both Cartesian frames and «boundaries», but I want to take a shot at explaining what feels to me like some confusions in this post. Also a bunch of this might be invalidated by your disclaimer that this post was published before the final version of Crtich’s boundaries sequence.
It seems to me that your work in Cartesian frames is about finding an ontology in which we can make progress on agent foundations in general, whereas Critch’s concept of boundaries is about formalizing a necessary condition for identifying when an agent exists in a particular system.
Indeed! We wouldn’t want a theory of agents (or boundaries) to be applicable to a state in thermal equilibrium, for example, whereas we definitely want our ontology to be able to handle it.
This whole section is actually a little confusing. It sounds like you’re interpreting Critch’s sequence to be saying that boundaries are inherently physical. But aren’t all the definitions in terms of information theory? The nodes in the network are course-grained, but aren’t we free to decide what about the world the are abstracted from?
It seems entirely possible to me for a formalization of boundaries to allow for two different but equally-valid boundaries to be drawn within the state.
Actually, now that I think about it, is there any reason that Critch’s definition of boundaries isn’t fully compatible with the ontology of factored sets?