I feel like the whole “subagent” framework suffers from homunculus problem: we fail to explain behavior using the abstraction of coherent agent, so we move to the abstraction of multiple coherent agents, and while it can be useful, I don’t think it displays actual mechanistic truth about minds.
When I plan something and then fail to execute plan it’s mostly not like “failure to bargain”. It’s just when I plan something I usually have good consequences of plan in my imagination and this consequences make me excited and then I start plan execution and get hit by multiple unpleasant details of reality. Coherent structure emerges from multiple not-really-agentic pieces.
You are taking subagents too literally here.
If you prefer take another word like shard, fragment, component, context-dependent action impulse generator etc
When I read word “bargaining” I assume that we are talking about entities that have preferences, action set, have beliefs about relations between actions and preferences and exchange information (modulo acausal interaction) with other entities of the same composition. Like, Kelly betting is good because it equals to Nash bargaining between versions of yourself from inside different outcomes and this is good because we assume that you in different outcomes are, actually, agent with all arrtibutes of agentic system. Saying “systems consist of parts, this parts interact and sometimes result is a horrific incoherent mess” is true, but doesn’t convey much of useful information.
I feel like the whole “subagent” framework suffers from homunculus problem: we fail to explain behavior using the abstraction of coherent agent, so we move to the abstraction of multiple coherent agents, and while it can be useful, I don’t think it displays actual mechanistic truth about minds.
When I plan something and then fail to execute plan it’s mostly not like “failure to bargain”. It’s just when I plan something I usually have good consequences of plan in my imagination and this consequences make me excited and then I start plan execution and get hit by multiple unpleasant details of reality. Coherent structure emerges from multiple not-really-agentic pieces.
You are taking subagents too literally here. If you prefer take another word like shard, fragment, component, context-dependent action impulse generator etc
When I read word “bargaining” I assume that we are talking about entities that have preferences, action set, have beliefs about relations between actions and preferences and exchange information (modulo acausal interaction) with other entities of the same composition. Like, Kelly betting is good because it equals to Nash bargaining between versions of yourself from inside different outcomes and this is good because we assume that you in different outcomes are, actually, agent with all arrtibutes of agentic system. Saying “systems consist of parts, this parts interact and sometimes result is a horrific incoherent mess” is true, but doesn’t convey much of useful information.