The Active Inference literature on this is very strong, and I think the best and most overlooked part of what it offers. In Active Inference, an agent is first and foremost a persistent boundary. Specifically, it is a persistent Markov Blanket, a idea due to Judea Pearl. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markov_blanket The short version: a Markov blanket is a statement that a certain amount of state (the interior of the agent) is conditionally independent of a certain other amount of state (the rest of the universe), and that specifically its independence is conditioned on the blanket state that sits in between the exterior and the interior.
You can show that, in order for an agent to... (read 387 more words →)
The Active Inference literature on this is very strong, and I think the best and most overlooked part of what it offers. In Active Inference, an agent is first and foremost a persistent boundary. Specifically, it is a persistent Markov Blanket, a idea due to Judea Pearl. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markov_blanket The short version: a Markov blanket is a statement that a certain amount of state (the interior of the agent) is conditionally independent of a certain other amount of state (the rest of the universe), and that specifically its independence is conditioned on the blanket state that sits in between the exterior and the interior.
You can show that, in order for an agent to... (read 387 more words →)