Great post! A thought: we seem able to intuitively differentiate coherent and incoherent behavior even without knowing the terminal goal. Humans, for instance, visibly differ in how “coherent” they are, which we can infer from local observations alone.
My conjecture is that coherence might overlap substantially with thermodynamic efficiency. If behavior is optimal for some terminal value, it must satisfy local Bellman-type consistency (no value loops). I suspect this has a physical parallel: where those local constraints hold tightly, you should see few avoidable losses (high Carnot efficiency); where they fail, you should find loss hotspots (rework, backtracking, waste heat). The local inconsistencies you describe might correspond directly to local inefficiencies, regions of high irreversibility.
Yup! A Simple Toy Coherence Theorem walks through a toy version of that idea, and I do think it’s a ripe area for someone to figure out more realistic theorems.
Great post! A thought: we seem able to intuitively differentiate coherent and incoherent behavior even without knowing the terminal goal. Humans, for instance, visibly differ in how “coherent” they are, which we can infer from local observations alone. My conjecture is that coherence might overlap substantially with thermodynamic efficiency. If behavior is optimal for some terminal value, it must satisfy local Bellman-type consistency (no value loops). I suspect this has a physical parallel: where those local constraints hold tightly, you should see few avoidable losses (high Carnot efficiency); where they fail, you should find loss hotspots (rework, backtracking, waste heat). The local inconsistencies you describe might correspond directly to local inefficiencies, regions of high irreversibility.
Yup! A Simple Toy Coherence Theorem walks through a toy version of that idea, and I do think it’s a ripe area for someone to figure out more realistic theorems.
Excellent! Thank you!
It would also be quite interesting to look at how coherence scales with system size, and if/when this imposes a limit on growth.