What you call floor for Alpha Go, i.e. the move evaluations, are not even boundaries (in the sense nostalgebraist define it), that would just be the object level (no meta at all) policy.
I think in general the idea of the object level policy with no meta isn’t well-defined, if the agent at least does a little meta all the time. In AlphaGo, it works fine to shut off the meta; but you could imagine a system where shutting off the meta would put it in such an abnormal state (like it’s on drugs) that the observed behavior wouldn’t mean very much in terms of its usual operation. Maybe this is the point you are making about humans not having a good floor/ceiling distinction.
But, I think we can conceive of the “floor” more generally. If the ceiling is the fixed structure, e.g. the update for the weights, the “floor” is the lowest-level content—e.g. the weights themselves. Whether thinking at some meta-level or not, these weights determine the fast heuristics by which a system reasons.
I still think some of what nostalgebraist said about boundaries seems more like the floor than the ceiling.
The space “between” the floor and the ceiling involves constructed meta levels, which are larger computations (ie not just a single application of a heuristic function), but which are not fixed. This way we can think of the floor/ceiling spectrum as small-to-large: the floor is what happens in a very small amount of time; the ceiling is the whole entire process of the algorithm (learning and interacting with the world); the “interior” is anything in-between.
Of course, this makes it sort of trivial, in that you could apply the concept to anything at all. But the main interesting thing is how an agent’s subjective experience seems to interact with floors and ceilings. IE, we can’t access floors very well because they happen “too quickly”, and besides, they’re the thing that we do everything with (it’s difficult to imagine what it would mean for a consciousness to have subjective “access to” its neurons/transistors). But we can observe the consequences very immediately, and reflect on that. And the fast operations can be adjusted relatively easy (e.g. updating neural weights). Intermediate-sized computational phenomena can be reasoned about, and accessed interactively, “from the outside” by the rest of the system. But the whole computation can be “reasoned about but not updated” in a sense, and becomes difficult to observe again (not “from the outside” the way smaller sub-computations can be observed).
I think in general the idea of the object level policy with no meta isn’t well-defined, if the agent at least does a little meta all the time. In AlphaGo, it works fine to shut off the meta; but you could imagine a system where shutting off the meta would put it in such an abnormal state (like it’s on drugs) that the observed behavior wouldn’t mean very much in terms of its usual operation. Maybe this is the point you are making about humans not having a good floor/ceiling distinction.
But, I think we can conceive of the “floor” more generally. If the ceiling is the fixed structure, e.g. the update for the weights, the “floor” is the lowest-level content—e.g. the weights themselves. Whether thinking at some meta-level or not, these weights determine the fast heuristics by which a system reasons.
I still think some of what nostalgebraist said about boundaries seems more like the floor than the ceiling.
The space “between” the floor and the ceiling involves constructed meta levels, which are larger computations (ie not just a single application of a heuristic function), but which are not fixed. This way we can think of the floor/ceiling spectrum as small-to-large: the floor is what happens in a very small amount of time; the ceiling is the whole entire process of the algorithm (learning and interacting with the world); the “interior” is anything in-between.
Of course, this makes it sort of trivial, in that you could apply the concept to anything at all. But the main interesting thing is how an agent’s subjective experience seems to interact with floors and ceilings. IE, we can’t access floors very well because they happen “too quickly”, and besides, they’re the thing that we do everything with (it’s difficult to imagine what it would mean for a consciousness to have subjective “access to” its neurons/transistors). But we can observe the consequences very immediately, and reflect on that. And the fast operations can be adjusted relatively easy (e.g. updating neural weights). Intermediate-sized computational phenomena can be reasoned about, and accessed interactively, “from the outside” by the rest of the system. But the whole computation can be “reasoned about but not updated” in a sense, and becomes difficult to observe again (not “from the outside” the way smaller sub-computations can be observed).