Epistemic status: exploratory, “shower thought”, written as part of a conversation with Claude:
For any given entity (broadly construed here to mean, essentially, any physical system), it is possible to analyze that entity as follows:
Define the set of possible future trajectories that entity might follow, according to some suitably uninformative ignorance prior on its state and (generalized) environment. Then ask, of that set, whether there exists some simple, obvious, or otherwise notable prior on the set in question, that assigns probabilities to various member trajectories in such a way as to establish an upper level set of some kind. Then ask, of that upper level set, how large it is relative to the size of the set as a whole, and (relatedly) how large the difference is between the probability of that upper set’s least probable member, and its most probable nonmember. (If you want to conceptualize these sets as infinite and open—although it’s unclear to me that one needs to conceptualize them this way—then you can speak instead of “infimum” and “supremum”.)
The claim is that, for some specific kinds of system, there will be quite a sharp difference between its upper level set and its lower level set, constituting a “plausibility gap”: trajectories within the upper set are in some sense “plausible” ways of extrapolating the system forward in time. And then the relative size of that upper set becomes relevant, because it indicates how tightly constrained the system’s time-evolution is by its present state (and environment). So, the claim is that there are certain systems for which their forwards time-evolution is very tightly constrained indeed, and these systems are “agents”; and there are systems for which barely any upper level set exists, and these are “simplistic” entities whose behavior is essentially entropic. And humans (seem to me to) occupy a median position between these two extremes.
One additional wrinkle, however, is that “agency”, as I’ve defined it here, may additionally play the role of a (dynamical system) attractor: entities already close to having full agency will be more tightly constrained in their future evolution, generally in the direction of becoming ever more agentic; meanwhile, entirely inanimate systems are not at all pulled in the direction of becoming more constrained or agentic; they are outside of the agency attractor’s basin of attraction. However, humans, if they indeed exist at some sort of halfway point between fully coherent agency and a complete lack of coherence, are left interestingly placed under this framing: we would exist at the boundary of the agency attractor’s basin of attraction. And since many such boundaries are fundamentally fractal or chaotic in nature, that could have troubling implications for the trajectories of points along those boundaries trying to reach reflective equilibrium, as it were.
Epistemic status: exploratory, “shower thought”, written as part of a conversation with Claude: