Overview and core tenets
@2022levinTechnological proposes the Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere (TAME) framework, which is an engineering-based (i.e., “understand, modify, build”) approach to empirically studying diverse intelligences.
Core tenets of TAME, after @2022levinTechnological
- Continuum of cognitive capacities: There is no binary between “true” cognition and lack thereof for either biological or artificial entities, but a sort of Cognitive gradualism in which progressively more complex abilities are generated from basal and proto-cognitive ones.
- Applicability to diverse intelligences: Cognition has a wide range of material implementations and is not limited to systems that gained agency through evolution.
- Continuum of persuadability: A system’s level of agency must be determined empirically, based on which kind of model “affords the most efficient way of prediction and control.”
- Selves are malleable: The substrate of an agent can be drastically remodeled in a lifetime; “the borders and scale of any Self can change over time.”
- Selves solve problems to pursue goals: Agency can be “nested and overlapping,” with lower level agents fulfilling simpler goals in a space of possibilities deformed by the higher level, more “intelligent” system.
- Intelligence as competency: Following The intentional stance, after Dennett, “estimates of intelligence of any system are observer-dependent, and say as much about the observer and their limitations as they do about the system itself.”
What is a Self?
@2022levinTechnological defines a single agent of interest, a Self, by the following unifying invariant:
[A system that is capable of expending] energy in ways that effectively reach specific states despite uncertainty, limitations of capability, and meddling from outside forces.
Selves have the following basic properties: “the ability to pursue goals, to own compound (e.g., associative) memories, and to serve as the locus for credit assignment (be rewarded or punished), where all of these are at a scale larger than possible for any of its components alone.”
TAME is a gradualist framework, under which the questions of interest are not whether a Self demonstrates the key properties, but how much:
There is no absolute, binary distinction between it knows and it “knows”—only a difference in the degree to which a model will be useful that incorporates such components.
Further reading
- Dukas, R. (1998). Cognitive Ecology.
- Rosenblueth et al. (1943). Behavior, purpose, and teleology.