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A try: An Agent is any object (which presumes a mechanism which clusters perceptions into objects, but which is a more general and separately solvable problem) whose interactions with other objects can best be modeled (in the sense of prediction) as having an inner model of the environment (which doesn't require recursion but doesn't preclude it).
A Fire Upon the Deep is one of my favorites.
This surprised me a bit:
There were others, such as John Von Neuman, who talked about a singular event occurring, because he had the idea of technological acceleration and singularity half a century ago.
Anybody have further pointers? I'm only a little surprised because also Norbert Wiener was writing about it, but I'd still know more about the history of the concept that slept for so long.
In the end, all behaviors are grounded in the brain's steering systems evaluation. The neocortex and the other parts of the brain can't optimize the steering system's implicit function directly, but only explore the search space incrementally from where it starts (as a baby). There are all kinds of attractor states and local maxima[1] that in human lifetime you likely can't reach anything close to optimum (not even considering the changing environment).
Whatever we call "terminal" can only be names for common[2] attractor states that people do not get out during the time of observation.
Here is a long list of fetishes together with their tabooness:
Would it be possible to determine the equivalent dimension of a layer of the human language cortex with this method? You can't do API calls to a brain, but you can prompt people and estimate the probability of a response token by repeated sampling, maybe from different people.
There is more than one possibility when you append "if you know what I mean" to the end of a random sentence:
Sure, the first is the strongest, but the others would move the centroid away from "phallus". The centroid is not at the most likely item but at the average.
The first link goes to a recording from 2023