Jeff Beck: commitment

Transcript context

…Some of these things are a little bit weird. Know, some cultures have, you know, maybe 1 culture doesn't have the notion of time and some cultures might see 2 objects as 1. So is there a potential problem here that there's some ambiguity that we need to overcome? I'm not gonna say that there's not the potential problem for ambiguity that we need to overcome. What I will say instead is that is that the the additional constraint that we're imposing, it's not just about objects, it's also about their relationships. Now think about physics. This is this is why we this is why the physics discovery stuff is such a big part of it, right? In physics, in particular like, you know, Newtonian mechanics, you can, you know, let's pretend we're living in a world of rigid bodies. Right? So all I need to worry about is like weight and shape of things, and that defines a particular object type. But I also need to know how they interact. And so in in in Newtonian mechanics, we have like, you know, what we can do is we can take these objects, we can watch them like bouncing off of each other and doing all these sorts of things. And we can quickly infer that like, oh, like their interactions are all governed by us in a single language, which is the language of forces and force vectors. Right? That that that language of interaction, right, is really what makes it work. Right? Otherwise, we'd just have, like, you know, pictures of things. That's all we would have got. What you're empirically discovering is sort of a generalized notion of forces that describe the relationships between things, and you can, the constraint that you place in order to avoid the problem of things being too brittle, right, is that well, they all have to use the same class of forces together in order to interact. We're stuck with that. But by being flexible about our definition of what a force is and the having the ability to discover new kinds of forces, not just like literal force vectors, right, gives us the ability to sort of generalize without be without becoming too brittle. You're talking to this interaction dynamic. So there's a graph of interactions which might possibly represent affordances in the macroscopic domain. And by doing analysis on the interaction graph and sort of simplifying the analysis as much as possible, you get a principled way to partition the world up.…

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