I buy Abram’s criticism as a criticism of a narrow interpretation of “Markov blankets”, in which we only admit “structural” blankets in some Bayes net. But Markov blankets are defined more generally than that via statistical independence, and it seems like non-structural blankets should still be workable for “things which move”. Handling the “moving” indexicals is tricky, I’m not saying I have a full answer ready to go, but it Markov blankets still seem like the right building block.
I buy Abram’s criticism as a criticism of a narrow interpretation of “Markov blankets”, in which we only admit “structural” blankets in some Bayes net. But Markov blankets are defined more generally than that via statistical independence, and it seems like non-structural blankets should still be workable for “things which move”. Handling the “moving” indexicals is tricky, I’m not saying I have a full answer ready to go, but it Markov blankets still seem like the right building block.
@abramdemski
Update: Agent Boundaries Aren’t Markov Blankets. [no longer endorsed]