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 those 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 those capacities?”