Yeah, the stuff in the updatelessness section was supposed to gesture at how to handle this with my definition.
First of all, I think children surprise me enough in pursuit of their own goals that they do often count as agents by the definition in the post.
But, if children or animals who are intuitively agents often don’t fit the definition in the post, my idea is that you can detect their agency by looking at things with increasingly time/space/data bounded probability distributions. I think taking on “smaller” perspectives is very important.
Wouldn’t the granularity of the action space also impact things? For example, even if a child struggles to pick up some object, you would probably do an even worse job if your action space was picking joint angles, or forces for muscles to apply, or individual timings of action potentials to send to separate nerves.
Yeah, the stuff in the updatelessness section was supposed to gesture at how to handle this with my definition.
First of all, I think children surprise me enough in pursuit of their own goals that they do often count as agents by the definition in the post.
But, if children or animals who are intuitively agents often don’t fit the definition in the post, my idea is that you can detect their agency by looking at things with increasingly time/space/data bounded probability distributions. I think taking on “smaller” perspectives is very important.
Wouldn’t the granularity of the action space also impact things? For example, even if a child struggles to pick up some object, you would probably do an even worse job if your action space was picking joint angles, or forces for muscles to apply, or individual timings of action potentials to send to separate nerves.