Status: Currently reading Dennett’s book on agency.

Interesting that humans, machines, and living things can all be treated as things with agency and goals. This goal directedness makes prediction easier.

For instance, while I certainly can’t predict where every atom in another person’s body is going to be in a second, I can make a very good guess because I treat them as agents with some goal in mind. Is this just a cognitive hack to make the world more understandable?

In a sense, this also opens up computational intractable problems. For instance, it’d be impossible to predict with near certainty where someone is in a year, yet if that person is say a famous artist on tour, then I can know with exact certainty that they’ll be in this locale barring changes.