Re: Artem Kaznatcheev • Fitness Landscapes as Mental & Mathematical Models of Evolution

The question of “mental models” has occupied my thoughts for quite a while.

As intelligent agents with a capacity for inquiry, we have ways of forming and transforming independent representations of reality — “reality” being one of many names we give the imagined source of impressions that persist in impressing themselves on us and that we sort on a trial basis to the bins of our external and internal worlds.

As social agents with a capacity for communication, we have ways of impressing our personal representations on external media and sharing them with other sign-using agents, with all the contingencies and difficulties that bedevil our partly phylogenetic and partly ontogenetic capacity for sharing signs.

I tend to come at these questions from a system-theoretic direction, asking “Where is the threshold of system-theoretic complexity that must be crossed in order to achieve the first signs of these capacities?”