Neri Oxman: belief

Transcript context

…And maybe you’ll figure something out as you say it also. Of course, Christopher is the master here, but really we were thinking again, what does nature want? Nature wants to increase the information dimension and reduce entropy. What do we want? We kind of want the same thing. We want more, but we want order. And this goes back to your conversation with Joscha about stochastic versus deterministic languages or processes. His definition or the definition he found was that an agent is empowered if the entropy of the distribution of all of its states it’s high while the entropy of the distribution of a single state given a choice, given an action is low. Meaning it’s that kind of duality between opportunity like starting like this and going like this, opening and closing. And this really, I think is analogous to human empowerment, given infinite wide array of choices. What is the choice that you make to enable, to empower, to provide you with the agency that you need? And how much does that making that choice actually control the trajectory of the system? That’s really nice. So this applies to all the kinds of systems you’re talking about.…

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