But such deflationary notions of agency seem deeply uncomfortable to a lot of people because they violate the very human-centric notion that lots of simple things don’t have “real” agency because we understand their mechanism, whereas things with agency seem to be complex in a way that we can’t easily understand how they work.
But given that we want to understand “real” agency, not some “mysterious agency” stemming from not understanding inner workings of some glorified thermostat, would it not make sense to start with something simple?
That is, there isn’t much to study in “abstract” agency, independent of the substrate it’s implemented on
Yeah, that’s the question, is agency substrate-independent or not, and if it is, does it help to pick a specific substrate, or would one make more progress by doing it more abstractly, or maybe both?
Yeah, that seems like a big part of it. I remember posting to that effect some years ago https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NptifNqFw4wT4MuY8/agency-is-bugs-and-uncertainty
But given that we want to understand “real” agency, not some “mysterious agency” stemming from not understanding inner workings of some glorified thermostat, would it not make sense to start with something simple?
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Yeah, that’s the question, is agency substrate-independent or not, and if it is, does it help to pick a specific substrate, or would one make more progress by doing it more abstractly, or maybe both?