Jeff Beck: belief

Transcript context

…Okay. So agents need to be physical. So I do believe that an agent needs to be physical. Absolutely. I don't believe, you know, I I believe you can have a model of agency and not have an agent. Right? I, you know, you can put that model in a computer and run it and make predictions as to what an agent would do. You and it might even be a 100% correct, but I still wouldn't call it an agent. But again, this is like getting into philosophy. And like philosophy frustrates the Bayesian because philosophy is not probabilistic. Right? Philosophy is really about drawing clear lines and distinctions. And in my world, those don't really exist. Right? There's everything has an error bar. You know? All of there isn't a clear delineation between, you know, you know, an object and an agent. It's really, you know, in from this modeling perspective, it's really just a question of degrees, And philosophy is terrible at handling questions of degree. My friend Keith, he's a big fan of computability theory. And he thinks that an agent is basically a type of computation. And it has access to ambient state and it can take action and there's this kind of like cybernetic loop. And for him, the strength of the agency in the system is the compute type that the thing is doing, right? So if it's a finite state automata, then it's a weak agent. If it's a Turing machine, it's a strong agent.…

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