Exactly. This agency idea is appealing because it seems to unify a number of other ideas: from evolution (survival), autopioesis, active inference and Bayesianism. Without sounding too much of a crackpot, I hope we’ll be able to import subjective experience as a necessary component in the universe.
I personally hope they are not as subjective as we see today. Perhaps there are reasons why, say red, appears as it does.
A ruleset there would, to me at least, be profound. While it may remain impossible to directly convey thoughts, impressions, we may well end up with far better language to work with and see commonalities we do not today.
Re: agency
A thing aware it is a thing, may be the root of real AI too.
I have long thought these disjointed, brain in a jar essentially, experiments lack that. No body, no closed loop with themselves, no sense of being = no agency.
We may also find intelligence is rooted in an interest, need to exist, or just be an expression.
By that, I mean what I did above. A rock is essentially what has happened. Information in matter form, a record.
Agency, is meta. Beings see expressions, the world, and due to their nature, being sufficiently complex, have an interest, themselves, their kind, apart from the world and it's undulating history.
Not necessarily. Humans learn anything through inputs of sight, sound, feeling and smell. Different conscious bodies could have different ways of learning about things around them, and hence a totally different model of reality around them.
They can't tell us anything about their consciousness for the same reasons why we can't talk to stones.
How they get the data is a matter of their nature, not whether they are beings.
I also did not speak to their state, only what may define actually having one, as opposed to being something simpler, an expression as I put it above.
We can get the message of the stone, the stone also is changed by us having done it. It literally is what happens to it.
There is that.
There is no boundary problem then, just one of degree.
Seems silly, but everything has a point of view and whatever level of complexity it has determines what consciousness it presents.
A rock has very little complexity. It literally is just an expression. What has happened to it equals what it is.
When something has enough complexity to be aware of the boundary between "it" and everything else, then we have a being of some kind.
Little organisms, insects, plants, all continue to present surprising behavior to us. Bees can do basic math, what nothing is.
And plants. They are slow, by their nature, but we are finding they communicate in ways.
Animals are a lot like us, just simpler.
>It’s exciting times! Let’s hope that we’re able to get a grip on this question of why we have this subjective experience of red colour.
Seconded. We may find there are rules, that experience may be predicted, or at least better understood.