Epistemic Status: Attempting to bridge what I see as a missing inferential link in the post / sequence.
(This is a point which I picked up on because I am familiar with what Abram was thinking about 3 years ago, and I was surprised it didn’t get mentioned. Maybe it was assumed to be obvious, maybe it’s not as relevant as I assumed, but I think some others will find the point worth a bit more explaining.)
The reason we care about the relative size of the world and the model is that we have a deep reason to think that a model smaller than the world cannot perform optimally—it’s the Conant-Ashby Theorem, which states “every good regulator of a system must be a model of that system.” For a great explanation of this idea, there is a paper that Abram pointed me to years ago, “Every good key must be a model of the lock it opens (The Conant & Ashby Theorem Revisited)” To quote from there:
“What all of this means, more or less, is that the pursuit of a goal by some dynamic agent (Regulator) in the face of a source of obstacles (System) places at least one particular and unavoidable demand on that agent, which is that the agent’s behaviors must be executed in such a reliable and predictable way that they can serve as a representation (Model) of that source of obstacles.”
To lay the connection out explicitly, if the agent model of the world is not isomorphic to the world, the actions chosen will be sub-optimal. This is bad if we assume the world is not isomorphic to a simple model (and this sequence is laying out reasons that for reflexive agents, there cannot be such a computational model.)
Epistemic Status: Attempting to bridge what I see as a missing inferential link in the post / sequence.
(This is a point which I picked up on because I am familiar with what Abram was thinking about 3 years ago, and I was surprised it didn’t get mentioned. Maybe it was assumed to be obvious, maybe it’s not as relevant as I assumed, but I think some others will find the point worth a bit more explaining.)
The reason we care about the relative size of the world and the model is that we have a deep reason to think that a model smaller than the world cannot perform optimally—it’s the Conant-Ashby Theorem, which states “every good regulator of a system must be a model of that system.” For a great explanation of this idea, there is a paper that Abram pointed me to years ago, “Every good key must be a model of the lock it opens (The Conant & Ashby Theorem Revisited)” To quote from there:
“What all of this means, more or less, is that the pursuit of a goal by some dynamic agent (Regulator) in the face of a source of obstacles (System) places at least one particular and unavoidable demand on that agent, which is that the agent’s behaviors must be executed in such a reliable and predictable way that they can serve as a representation (Model) of that source of obstacles.”
To lay the connection out explicitly, if the agent model of the world is not isomorphic to the world, the actions chosen will be sub-optimal. This is bad if we assume the world is not isomorphic to a simple model (and this sequence is laying out reasons that for reflexive agents, there cannot be such a computational model.)