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Private versus public: A dual model for resource-constrained conflict representations
- Simon DeDeo
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- Journal:
- Behavioral and Brain Sciences / Volume 45 / 2022
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 07 July 2022, e102
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- Article
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Pietraszewski's representation scheme is parsimonious and intuitive. However, internal mental representations may be subject to resource constraints that prefer more unusual systems such as sparse coding or compressed sensing. Pietraszewski's scheme may be most useful for understanding how agents communicate. Conflict may be driven in part by the complex interplay between parsimonious public representations and more resource-efficient internal ones.
10 - The Many Faces of State Space Compression
- from Part III - Life's Hidden Information
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- By David Wolpert, University of California, Eric Libby, McGill University, Joshua A. Grochow, the Santa Fe Institute (SFI), Simon Dedeo, Indiana University
- Edited by Sara Imari Walker, Arizona State University, Paul C. W. Davies, Arizona State University, George F. R. Ellis, University of Cape Town
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- Book:
- From Matter to Life
- Published online:
- 02 March 2017
- Print publication:
- 23 February 2017, pp 199-243
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Summary
Historically, scientists have defined the “macrostate” of a system, and the associated “level” or “scale,” in a purely informal manner, based on insight and intuition. For example, in evolutionary biology often the macrostate is an entire species, a quantification of a set of coevolving organisms that ignores within-species diversity, fundamental dependencies between organisms, and complicated subunits such as tissues and cells that can also reproduce. Similarly, in economics the macrostates of the world's socioeconomic system are often defined in terms of firms, industrial sectors, or even nation-states, neglecting the internal structure of these highly complex entities.
One might view the reliance of many sciences on such vague human “insight” into how to even describe a physical system – a reliance that has no formal justification – as troubling. How do we know that these choices for the macrostates are the best ones with which to analyze the system? How do we even quantify the quality of a choice of macrostate? Might there be alternatives that are superior to our choices? A superior choice might, for example, allow greater accuracy in our prediction of the evolution of the system and/or reduce the computational cost of making such predictions. Given the possibility that superior choices might exist, can we solve for the optimal macroscopic state space with which to investigate a system?
This question, of how best to compress amicrostate of a system into a macrostate, is the general problem of state space compression (SSC). To address this problem, we must first decide how to quantify the quality of a proposed map xt → yt that compresses a dynamically evolving “fine-grained” microstate xt into a dynamically evolving “coarse-grained” macrostate yt. Given a definition of the quality of any compression and a microstate dynamics xt, we can try to solve for the best map compressing xt into a higher-scale macrostate yt. The dynamics of such an optimally chosen compression of a system can be viewed as defining its emergent properties. Indeed, we may be able to iterate this process, producing a hierarchy of scales and associated emergent properties, by compressing the macrostate y to a yet higherscale macrostate y′.
16 - Major Transitions in Political Order
- from Part V - From Matter to Mind
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- By Simon Dedeo, Indiana University
- Edited by Sara Imari Walker, Arizona State University, Paul C. W. Davies, Arizona State University, George F. R. Ellis, University of Cape Town
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- Book:
- From Matter to Life
- Published online:
- 02 March 2017
- Print publication:
- 23 February 2017, pp 393-428
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Summary
[T]hey then threw me upon the bed, and one of them (I think it was Mary Smith) kneeled on my breast, and with one hand held my throat; Mary Junque felt for my money; by my struggling about, they did not get it at that time; then they called another woman in … when she came in, they said cut him! cut him! – Evidence of Benjamin Leethorp in the trial of Mary Junque and Mary Smith for grand larceny, Old Bailey Criminal Court, London, England; April 4, 1779 (Hitchcock et al., 2012)
Unless we are historians, the eighteenth-century world of Junque, Smith, and Leethorp is almost impossible to imagine. In stealing from Leethorp, the two women put themselves at risk not only of imprisonment but of indentured servitude in the colonies and even death. Leethorp, for his part, began his evidence by explaining to the jury how he was seeking a brothel different from the one in which he was throttled, stripped, and robbed. Junque and Smith were without benefit of legal counsel, and Smith's witnesses, unaware of the trial date, did not appear. The court condemned them to branding and a year's imprisonment in less than 500 words. The indictment, formally for a nonviolent offense, was one of hundreds of its kind that decade marked by assault, knives, and (sometimes) freely-flowing blood.
In the risks they ran and the things they were ashamed of, the three are alien to us; in its casual violence, so was the society that enclosed them. Yet this world gradually, continually, evolved into one far less tolerant of violence and yet far more protective of an individual's rights – into the world, in other words, of most readers of this volume. How witnesses, victims, and defendants spoke about both facts and norms in the law courts of London shifted, decade by decade, over the course of one hundred and fifty years (Klingenstein et al., 2014). This shift in speech paralleled a similar decline in how people behaved toward each other, as the state came, increasingly, to enforce its monopoly on violence (Elias, 1982).