Another point here is that “an empty room” doesn’t mean “no context”. Presumably when you’re sitting in an empty room, your world-model is still active, it’s still tracking events that you expect to be happening in the world outside the room — and your shards see them too. So, e. g., if you have a meeting scheduled in a week, and you went into an empty room, after a few days there your world-model would start saying “the meeting is probably soon”, and that will prompt your punctuality shard.
Similarly, your self-model is part of the world-model, so even if everything outside the empty room were wiped out, you’d still have your “internal context” — and there’d be some shards that activate in response to events in it as well.
It’s actually pretty difficult to imagine what an actual “no context” situation for realistic agents would look like. I guess you can imagine surgically removing all input channels from the WM to shards, to model this?
I think people go in silence retreats to find out what happens when you take out all the standard busy work. I could imagine the “fresh empty room” and “accustomed empty room” being the difference of calming down for an hour in contrast to a week.
Another point here is that “an empty room” doesn’t mean “no context”. Presumably when you’re sitting in an empty room, your world-model is still active, it’s still tracking events that you expect to be happening in the world outside the room — and your shards see them too. So, e. g., if you have a meeting scheduled in a week, and you went into an empty room, after a few days there your world-model would start saying “the meeting is probably soon”, and that will prompt your punctuality shard.
Similarly, your self-model is part of the world-model, so even if everything outside the empty room were wiped out, you’d still have your “internal context” — and there’d be some shards that activate in response to events in it as well.
It’s actually pretty difficult to imagine what an actual “no context” situation for realistic agents would look like. I guess you can imagine surgically removing all input channels from the WM to shards, to model this?
I think people go in silence retreats to find out what happens when you take out all the standard busy work. I could imagine the “fresh empty room” and “accustomed empty room” being the difference of calming down for an hour in contrast to a week.