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AGENCY
The following terms and their respective definitions (and elaborating paragraphs) describe agency as an emergent property of a sufficiently complex information processing entity which enables that entity to (a) determine what that entity’s goals are and (b) to manipulate that entity’s environment in accordance to those goals (such that the entity observes its own goals transforming from what that entity initially conceptualizes as noumena to what that entity later observes as phenomena).
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INFORMATION_PROCESSING_AGENT: a finite allocation of space, time, matter, and energy which renders perceptions, which executes decisions, and which implements behaviors as a means to attain that information processing agent’s goals.
An information processing agent is a physical or virtual computer.
ENVIRONMENT: the finite set of phenomena which an information processing agent renders and perceives as being external to that information processing agent’s spatially finite body.
Note that it is possible for an information processing agent to perceive no boundary between itself and its environment. If that is the case, that information processing agent would perceive itself as having no agency (i.e. and agency is defined as an information processing agent appearing to itself to have some degree of control over which phenomena appear and which phenomena disappear inside of that information processing agent’s field of awareness such that the information processing agent is able to manifest its goals as desired future outcomes which appear to that information processing agent to happen as a result of that agent’s actions). Whether or not an information processing agent perceives a boundary between itself and its environment, that information processing agent’s perceptions, decisions, and actions are nevertheless deterministically controlled by the universe (if not multiverse) which that information processing agent is a part of and/or a container of.
ALGORITHM: a sequence comprised of some natural number of specific non-overlapping behaviors which are each implemented one-at-a-time in a particular order within a finite space-time interval using a finite amount of energy in order to accomplish some goal.
An example of an algorithm is a C++ function which is used by a digital computer to calculate the Nth term of the FIBONACCI_SEQUENCE (where N is a sufficiently small nonnegative integer).
An algorithm is an example of a deterministic process.
GOAL: a particular condition of an information processing agent’s environment which that information processing agent initially conceptualizes as being a noumenon and which that information processing agent decides is sufficiently worthwhile for that information processing agent to invest energy towards attempting to manifest as a phenomenon in that information processing agent’s attention span by planning and then executing behaviors which that information processing agent thinks will be sufficiently likely to cause that goal state to become phenomenal and not merely noumenal inside of that information processing agent’s attention span at within some finite space-time interval in that information processing agent’s future.
An example of a goal is the author of this website desiring to visit each page of this website infinitely many times in the author’s future (which compels the author of this website to save the Uniform Resource Locator of each web page within website (i.e. the website whose domain name is phonetically worded as Karlina Object dot WordPress dot Com) to the WayBack Machine at Archive dot Org at least once per week while the author is alive).
PERCEPTION: an information processing agent rendering phenomena inside of that agent’s field of awareness as a result of that information processing agent (a) receiving “low level” sensory input data through that information processing agent’s peripheral nervous system and sensory organs, (b) retrieving “middle level” sensory and conceptual throughput data which that information processing agent previously encoded and stored as memories inside of that information processing agent’s long-term information storage apparatus, and (c) generating “high level” conceptual throughput data which that information processing agent synthesizes from retrieved memories, from incoming sensory input, and from logical associations which relate one piece of data to some other piece of data in that information processing agent’s short-term information storage apparatus.
/** * An information processing agent’s most * recent perception could be described as a * function whose input is that information * processing agent’s most recent behavior. */ perception := behavior(time_i). // perception occurs time_i + 1
DECISION: an information processing agent imagining a finite set of multiple options for how that information processing agent could behave and then using an algorithmic process of elimination to reduce that set of options down to exactly one option (and that selected option is what the information processing agent predicts will be the most effective option for accomplishing that information processing agent’s goals).
/** * An information processing agent’s most * recent decision could be described as a * function whose input is that information * processing agent’s most recent perception. */ decision := perception(time_i). // perception occurs at time_i + 1
BEHAVIOR: an information processing agent implementing a decision making process such that exactly one of some natural number of imagined options is selected (and when that option is selected, energy is transferred from one region of that information processing agent’s environment to some other part of that information processing agent’s environment such that physical work can be measured as having occurred (and work is a finite amount of energy which is used to move some spatially finite object which has a finite amount of mass across some finite distance through space and time).
/** * An information processing agent’s most * recent behavior could be described as a * function whose input is that information * processing agent’s most recent decision. */ behavior := decision(time_i). // behavior occurs at time_i + 1
This web page was last updated on 20_OCTOBER_2022. The content displayed on this web page is licensed as PUBLIC_DOMAIN intellectual property.
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This web page was last updated on 23_OCTOBER_2022. The content displayed on this web page is licensed as PUBLIC_DOMAIN intellectual property.
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