Jeff Beck: preference

Transcript context

…Yeah. You know, there's the kind of the philosophical highbrow notion of agency that we introduce notions of intentionality and self causation and things like that. I mean, really no nonsense version of an agency is it's just a thing which acts and performs some kind of computation. And I guess you could almost model anything as an agent. Yeah. Well, if your definition of an agent is something that executes a policy, then anything is an agent. A rock is an agent. It's an input a policy is an input output relationship. When many people talk about agents, they they're adding a few they're adding a few additional elements that I think have a lot to do with how the policy is computed. Right? So for example, when we think of how the difference between, like, us and, like like, really, like, amoebas, we we often cite things like planning, counterfactual reasoning, goal oriented behavior. Right? We're specifying things that that have that that are specific mean that that are all related to how it is we compute our policies. Right? They're latent variables that represent policies that are compatible with reinforcement learning. And that's the defining characteristic of an agent. But you could very easily just say from an outside perspective, if you can't look at how someone or something is doing the computations, if the only thing you observe is the policy, does that mean that you can never conclude that something's an agent? And I would say no. You'd still like to be able to conclude that this is an agent, Even though the only thing I ever get to measure is its policy. But do you think we…

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