I’m not totally sure I’m objecting to anything. For something that thinks about and interacts with the world more or less like a human, I agree that turning a knob is probably an objectively better affordance than e.g. selecting the location of each atom individually.
You could even phrase this as an objective fact: “for agents in some class that includes humans, there are certain guidelines for constructing causal models that, if obeyed, lead to them being better predictors than if not.” This would be a fact about the territory. And it would tell you that if you were like a human, and wanted to predict the effect of your actions, there would be some rules your map would follow.
And then if your map did follow those rules, that would be a fact about your map.
I think there’s a way to drop the “for humans/agents like humans” part. Like, we could drop our circuit in the middle of the woods, and sometimes random animals would accidentally turn the knob on the supply, or temperature changes would adjust the resistance in the resistor. “Which counterfactuals actually happen sometimes” doesn’t really seem like the right criterion to use as fundamental here, but it does suggest that there’s something more universal in play.
I think another related qualitative intuition is constructive vs. nonconstructive. “Just turn the knob” is simple and obvious enough to you to be regarded as constructive, not leaving any parts unspecified for a planner to compute. “Just set the voltage to 10V” seems nonconstructive—like it would require further abstract thought to make a plan to make the voltage be 10V. But as we’ve learned, turning knobs is a fairly tricky robotics task, requiring plenty of thought—just thought that’s unconscious in humans.
I’m not totally sure I’m objecting to anything. For something that thinks about and interacts with the world more or less like a human, I agree that turning a knob is probably an objectively better affordance than e.g. selecting the location of each atom individually.
You could even phrase this as an objective fact: “for agents in some class that includes humans, there are certain guidelines for constructing causal models that, if obeyed, lead to them being better predictors than if not.” This would be a fact about the territory. And it would tell you that if you were like a human, and wanted to predict the effect of your actions, there would be some rules your map would follow.
And then if your map did follow those rules, that would be a fact about your map.
I think there’s a way to drop the “for humans/agents like humans” part. Like, we could drop our circuit in the middle of the woods, and sometimes random animals would accidentally turn the knob on the supply, or temperature changes would adjust the resistance in the resistor. “Which counterfactuals actually happen sometimes” doesn’t really seem like the right criterion to use as fundamental here, but it does suggest that there’s something more universal in play.
I think another related qualitative intuition is constructive vs. nonconstructive. “Just turn the knob” is simple and obvious enough to you to be regarded as constructive, not leaving any parts unspecified for a planner to compute. “Just set the voltage to 10V” seems nonconstructive—like it would require further abstract thought to make a plan to make the voltage be 10V. But as we’ve learned, turning knobs is a fairly tricky robotics task, requiring plenty of thought—just thought that’s unconscious in humans.