These aren’t contradictory or extremes of a continuum, they’re different levels of description of agency. A complete enough lookup table is indistinguishable from having goals. A deep enough neural net (say, a brain) is a pretty complete lookup table.
The “one goal” idea is a slightly confused modeling level—“goal” isn’t really unitary or defined well enough to say whether a set of desires is one conjunctive goal or many coordinated and weighted goals.
These aren’t contradictory or extremes of a continuum, they’re different levels of description of agency. A complete enough lookup table is indistinguishable from having goals. A deep enough neural net (say, a brain) is a pretty complete lookup table.
The “one goal” idea is a slightly confused modeling level—“goal” isn’t really unitary or defined well enough to say whether a set of desires is one conjunctive goal or many coordinated and weighted goals.