You can never know from the outside, just by observing behavior, whether something is truly doing planning and counterfactual reasoning or merely executing a complex input-output function — all models of agency are only ever 'as if' models, because science is fundamentally about prediction and data compression, not ground truth about internal mechanism.

9:29it's important to remember that like no matter how clever your model is and no matter how clever your approach is and how clever the words are that you use to describe it um a lot of this stuff is is is as if right this is this is the best model right it's not the it's not this is why like I I I repeat this over and over again

9:49grind it into the students right is that that you know science is about like prediction and data compression and like nothing else and the same thing is going on here right you you'll never, you know, just looking at behavior, you'll never know for sure in any meaningful way like whether or not it's it's just doing a function transformation or whether it's engaged in planning and counterfactual reasoning. But if your

10:11best model of it, if you sort of say, well, I tried to model as a function transformation, but god damn it, it had a lot of parameters, right? But then I tried to model it as something that was just doing Monte Carlo research on the inside and giving the answer and that had like, you know, 40 parameters and it's like, well, that's the model I'm going to go with and now I'm going to

10:26call it an agent. If we had a physical agent in the real world that was doing all of this planning and so on, would that have some kind of primacy to a computer simulation of agents that were doing all of this planning? >> Oh, is this is this like uh if I uploaded my brain onto a computer and didn't connect it to the world, would it still be thinking even though it's like

10:45doing all of those things? Is that the idea here or am I like >> that works? So, yeah, let's say highfidelity computer simulation of Jeff. Would would would Jeff be an agent? >> No. Oh, wasn't expecting you to say that >> because I'm the agent and if you uh uploaded No, I don't know. Um, so if you is do a highfidelity computer simulation and you put it in my body, then I think

11:07I would have to say it's an agent. >> Yeah. >> Right. If it's doing exactly the same, I mean, this is like the standard. It's doing exactly the same calculations from from a purely like phenomenological perspective, it's like it's the same. It's indistinguishable. >> Okay. So agents need to be physical. >> So I do believe that an agent needs to be physical. That absolutely. I don't believe, you know, I I believe you can

11:26have a model of agency and not have an agent, right? I, you know, you can put that model in a computer and run it and make predictions as to what an agent would do. You and it might even be 100% correct, but I still wouldn't call it an agent. But again, this is like getting into philosophy and like philosophy frustrates the basian because philosophy is not probabilistic,

11:46right? [laughter] philosophy is really about drawing clear lines and distinctions and in my world those don't really exist right there's everything has an error bar you know all of there isn't a clear delineation between you know uh you know an object and an agent it's really you know in from this modeling perspective it's really just a question of degrees and philosophy is terrible at handling questions of degree