I’m not arguing against studying amoebas, I’m arguing for also studying higher-level things including agency without first studying amoebas. Amoebas are simpler, which makes them easier to study, but they are also less agenty, and in some ways *less* simple *as agents*. It would be easier to understand an abstractly written program to perform addition, than to understand register readouts from a highly optimized program, even if the former never appears “in the wild” because it’s too computationally expensive.
going back to the clay token accounting might not have been a bad idea
I agree, as I said. But it would be a mistake to not also think at the abstract level; you can learn/invent digital addition just by trying to count stuff.
It’s a good point that there are trade-offs, and highly optimized programs, even if they perform a simple function, are hard to understand without “being inside” one. That’s one reason I linked a post about an even simpler and well understood potentially “agentic” system, the Game of Life, though it focuses on a different angle, not “let’s see what it takes to design a simple agent in this game”.
I’m not arguing against studying amoebas, I’m arguing for also studying higher-level things including agency without first studying amoebas. Amoebas are simpler, which makes them easier to study, but they are also less agenty, and in some ways *less* simple *as agents*. It would be easier to understand an abstractly written program to perform addition, than to understand register readouts from a highly optimized program, even if the former never appears “in the wild” because it’s too computationally expensive.
I agree, as I said. But it would be a mistake to not also think at the abstract level; you can learn/invent digital addition just by trying to count stuff.
It’s a good point that there are trade-offs, and highly optimized programs, even if they perform a simple function, are hard to understand without “being inside” one. That’s one reason I linked a post about an even simpler and well understood potentially “agentic” system, the Game of Life, though it focuses on a different angle, not “let’s see what it takes to design a simple agent in this game”.