Bacteria follow chemical gradients (and this feels agent-y to me), but the chemicals are immediately present both temporally and spatially.
Subtle point here: most of the agenty things which persist over time (like humans or bacteria) are optimizing their own future state, and it’s that future state which is far away in space/time from their current decision.
For instance, I can think of ways to make a rock interact with far away variables by e.g., coupling it to a human who presses various buttons based on the internal state or the rock. In this case, would you draw the boundary around both the rock and the human and say that that unit is “optimizing”?
The real answer here is that this post isn’t meant to handle that question. Some boundaries are clearly more natural optimizer boundaries than others, but this post is not yet trying to fully say which, it’s just laying some groundwork/necessary conditions. One of the necessary conditions which this post does not address is robustness of the optimization to changes in the environment, which is what makes e.g. the rock look like it’s not an optimizer.
Subtle point here: most of the agenty things which persist over time (like humans or bacteria) are optimizing their own future state, and it’s that future state which is far away in space/time from their current decision.
The real answer here is that this post isn’t meant to handle that question. Some boundaries are clearly more natural optimizer boundaries than others, but this post is not yet trying to fully say which, it’s just laying some groundwork/necessary conditions. One of the necessary conditions which this post does not address is robustness of the optimization to changes in the environment, which is what makes e.g. the rock look like it’s not an optimizer.