Exciting stuff. One thing I suspect is that you’ll need some different account for abstractions in the presence of agency/optimization than abstractions that deal with unoptimized things, because agency implies “conspiracies” where many factors may all work together to achieve something.
Like your current point about “information at a distance” probably applies to both, but the reasons that you end up with information at a distance likely differ; with non-agency phenomena, there’s probably going to be some story based on things like thermodynamics, averages over large numbers of homogenous components, etc., while agency makes things more complex.
Exciting stuff. One thing I suspect is that you’ll need some different account for abstractions in the presence of agency/optimization than abstractions that deal with unoptimized things, because agency implies “conspiracies” where many factors may all work together to achieve something.
Like your current point about “information at a distance” probably applies to both, but the reasons that you end up with information at a distance likely differ; with non-agency phenomena, there’s probably going to be some story based on things like thermodynamics, averages over large numbers of homogenous components, etc., while agency makes things more complex.