Thanks for being so wonderfully precise to make it easy for me to reply!
The part where you loose me is here:
Meanwhile, in our everyday experience, we all have an intuitive sense of animation / agency.
Where does this sense of agency come from? Likewise:
When we do this kind of analysis well, we’ll wind up describing every aspect of our actual everyday intuitions around animation / agency / alive-ness, and predicting all the items in §3.3.
How do we get from something seeming inherently surprising to something seeming agentic or embued with life-force?
EDITED TO ADD: Tbc I think you can explain agency (though not life-force, and you need to be carefuly to only interpret agency in this limited sense) through being able to predict outcomes without trajectories (as you also seem to have realized, as in “(derived from a pattern where I can make medium-term predictions despite short-term surprise)”). I wouldn’t equate agency with inherent surprisingness though, although it often occurs together.
Yeah, I think the §3.3.1 pattern (intrinsic surprisingness) is narrower than the §3.3.4 pattern (intrinsic surprisingness but with an ability to make medium-term predictions).
But they tend to go together so much in practice (life experience) that when we see the former we generally kinda assume the latter. An exception might be, umm, a person spasming, or having a seizure? Or a drunkard wandering about randomly? Hmm, maybe those don’t count because there are still some desires, e.g. the drunkard wants to remain standing.
I agree that agency / life-force has a strong connotation of the §3.3.4 thing, not just the §3.3.1 thing. Or at least, it seems to have that connotation in my own intuitions. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I feel like life-force seems like a sensation that’s different from what I’d expect from just having a thing in the world model with inherent surprisingness and ends-without-trajectory-predictions/”optimizerness” attached. (“Life-force” sounds more like “as if the thing had a soul” to me. I do not understand where this comes from but I don’t see how I’d predict such a sensation in advance given just the inherent-surprisingness + optimizerness hypothesis.)
Thanks for being so wonderfully precise to make it easy for me to reply!
The part where you loose me is here:
Where does this sense of agency come from? Likewise:
How do we get from something seeming inherently surprising to something seeming agentic or embued with life-force?
EDITED TO ADD: Tbc I think you can explain agency (though not life-force, and you need to be carefuly to only interpret agency in this limited sense) through being able to predict outcomes without trajectories (as you also seem to have realized, as in “(derived from a pattern where I can make medium-term predictions despite short-term surprise)”). I wouldn’t equate agency with inherent surprisingness though, although it often occurs together.
Yeah, I think the §3.3.1 pattern (intrinsic surprisingness) is narrower than the §3.3.4 pattern (intrinsic surprisingness but with an ability to make medium-term predictions).
But they tend to go together so much in practice (life experience) that when we see the former we generally kinda assume the latter. An exception might be, umm, a person spasming, or having a seizure? Or a drunkard wandering about randomly? Hmm, maybe those don’t count because there are still some desires, e.g. the drunkard wants to remain standing.
I agree that agency / life-force has a strong connotation of the §3.3.4 thing, not just the §3.3.1 thing. Or at least, it seems to have that connotation in my own intuitions. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I feel like life-force seems like a sensation that’s different from what I’d expect from just having a thing in the world model with inherent surprisingness and ends-without-trajectory-predictions/”optimizerness” attached. (“Life-force” sounds more like “as if the thing had a soul” to me. I do not understand where this comes from but I don’t see how I’d predict such a sensation in advance given just the inherent-surprisingness + optimizerness hypothesis.)