What I think Richard is denying is that a thermostat models certain things. It’s not that it doesn’t have a model, but it’s a model in the same sense that a line is a conic section (degenerate). It does not predict the future, it does not remember the past, and there is nothing in it that resembles Bayesian probabilities. It knows what the temperature is, but the latter is wired directly into the next action. Thought tends to involve a few intermediate stages.
What I think Richard is denying is that a thermostat models certain things. It’s not that it doesn’t have a model, but it’s a model in the same sense that a line is a conic section (degenerate). It does not predict the future, it does not remember the past, and there is nothing in it that resembles Bayesian probabilities. It knows what the temperature is, but the latter is wired directly into the next action. Thought tends to involve a few intermediate stages.