The agent-like structure problem is a question about how agents in the world are structured. I think rationalists generally have an intuition that the answer looks something like the following:

We assume the world follows some evolution law, e.g. maybe deterministically like <span>_x_{n+1} = f(x_n)_</span>, or maybe something stochastic. The intuition being that these are fairly general models of the world, so they should be able to capture whatever there is to capture. <span>_x_</span> here has some geometric structure, and we want to talk about areas of this geometric structure where there are agents.
An agent is characterized by a Markov blanket in the world that has informational input/output channels for the agent to get information to observe the world and send out information to act on it, intuitively because input/output channels are the most general way to model a relationship between two systems, and to embed one system within another [...]

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Outline:

(02:47) Radical computationalism is killed by information overload

(04:59) Energy-orientation solves information overload

(06:35) ... kinda

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First published:
August 17th, 2024

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YZvyQn2dAw4tL2xQY/rationalists-are-missing-a-core-piece-for-agent-like

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

“Rationalists are missing a core piece for agent-like structure (energy vs information overload) ” by tailcalled

LessWrong (30+ Karma)

“Rationalists are missing a core piece for agent-like structure (energy vs information overload) ” by tailcalled