After talking with Evan, I think I understand your point better. What I didn’t understand was that you seemed to argue that there was something else than the behavior that mattered for goal-directedness. But as I understand it now, what you’re saying is that, yes, the behavior is what matters, but extracting the relevant information from the behavior is really hard. And thus you believe that computing goal-directedness in any meaningful way will require normative assumptions about the cognition of the system, at an abstract level.
If that’s right, then I would still disagree with you, but I think the case for my position is far less settled than I assumed. I believe there are lots of interesting parts of goal-directedness that can be extracted from the behavior only, while acknowledging that historically, it has been harder to compute most complex properties of a system from behavior alone.
If that’s not right, then I propose that we schedule a call sometime, to clarify the disagreement with more bandwidth. Actually, even if it’s right, I can call to update you on the research.
After talking with Evan, I think I understand your point better. What I didn’t understand was that you seemed to argue that there was something else than the behavior that mattered for goal-directedness. But as I understand it now, what you’re saying is that, yes, the behavior is what matters, but extracting the relevant information from the behavior is really hard. And thus you believe that computing goal-directedness in any meaningful way will require normative assumptions about the cognition of the system, at an abstract level.
If that’s right, then I would still disagree with you, but I think the case for my position is far less settled than I assumed. I believe there are lots of interesting parts of goal-directedness that can be extracted from the behavior only, while acknowledging that historically, it has been harder to compute most complex properties of a system from behavior alone.
If that’s not right, then I propose that we schedule a call sometime, to clarify the disagreement with more bandwidth. Actually, even if it’s right, I can call to update you on the research.