Tim Scarfe: evaluation

Transcript context

…It's just vestigial. I mean, I think we really need to take seriously the economy that is there and of biological information processing. Do a lot more with a very limited energy budget running our brains every day than is is like artificial neural networks are really really expensive to run. It doesn't strike me that biological cognition could get away with being that wasteful. That surely to keep things sort of blowing up in terms of like energy being consumed for information processing biologically, that there must have been a fair amount of pruning on the way. I kind of think of agency as being a bit of a spectrum from, you you can think of it in a deflationary sense as being this autonomous thing that's the cause of its own actions. Right. And then the deep philosophical sense is that there's this intentionality and you can control the future and whatnot. And it rather speaks to like the physicist's view is that, you know, all of these, you have this light cone, you have all these micro interactions. Yeah. And, of course, that's beyond our cognitive horizon, so we develop ideas of representations where we can have these distal relationships between things that are in our mind and things that are far away in time and space. And I suppose you think of that as being another form of idealization. But the fascinating thing though, when I think about agency I think about it in terms of like apparent causal disconnectedness. We agents because you have consistent beliefs and ideas and you're not just an impulse response machine that's your being actions aren't determined entirely by this situation, you're a person. Yeah. And I kind of perceive that as a kind of causal disconnectedness. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. I mean, the what I say in the book in that chapter, I set out and I say this to be sort of very metaphysically neutral about what representation is, what intentionality is, But at the same time, not what I directly wrote in the book. I think I agree with you that there is something very important about connecting the notion of agency and intelligence with this thing of like being responsive to what is actually very distal. It could be distal in time and space, it could be like distal because it happened a long time ago, but this is what biological memory is. Things that happen like to you when you were a baby affect how you are now. Physical systems, like non living physical systems, they're much more constrained in their in their actions, and I don't mean that in like action, but just what they do, what happens to them, by what's proximal to them. There's like the distal is always screened off by the proximal, if that makes sense. Like the Whereas for you, all of these things that happened in the past could be as relevant as anything that happens in the room right now, or your ideas about the future would be relevant to what you're saying right now. So yeah, this this notion of being sensitive to what's not immediately driving you in your surroundings, I think that's a really important, like, thing to latch onto in, like, delineating at least the class of systems that we wanna call cognitive to ones that we would say are sort of merely physical, not intelligent in any important sense of the word.…

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