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 c... (read more)
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 c... (read more)