David Abel, André Barreto, Michael Bowling, Will Dabney, Shi Dong, Steven Hansen, Anna Harutyunyan, Khimya Khetarpal, Clare Lyle, Razvan Pascanu, Georgios Piliouras, Doina Precup, Jonathan Richens, Mark Rowland, Tom Schaul and Satinder Singh (2025), arXiv:2502.04403.
Key takeaways
From the reading, NOTE-793.
- The thesis. “The agency of any system is relative in the sense that it depends on arbitrary commitments that we collectively call a reference frame.”
- Four conditions, each two-valued. On an account “due largely to
Barandiaran et al. (2009)”, agency needs a boundary, being the source of
one’s action, goals and adaptivity. For each the paper cites a result
showing that it can come out either way:
- Jiang’s boundary-dependence of the optimal policy;
- Kenton et al.’s relativity to the choice of causal variables (LIT-909);
- inverse RL’s underdetermination of reward by behaviour;
- Zadeh’s “what … it is adaptive [to]”.
- A frame is the four commitments together. It is not formally defined. “Our definitions, claims, and arguments are purely philosophical.”
- How to choose a frame is left open. Dennett’s intentional stance “could be formalised as a principle for selecting frames in terms of predictive or explanatory power”.
- Weaker than it reads. The premises are existential and the conclusion universal, and “arbitrary” is asserted, not argued. Barandiaran’s requirement that the system individuate itself “without an observer” is not engaged.
Standing in the record
Filed 2026-10-12 for QUESTION-032 and read 2026-10-14 in NOTE-793. Its thesis is held as THEORY-249, Proposed. It supports QUESTION-032’s relativization of agency to a level and a target, and widens it to the choice of causal variables, the principle for meaningful goals and the class of meaningful adaptations. It gives no test and no verdict on the thermostat (CASE-044). It generalizes the decomposition-relativity that THEORY-232 (Watson, LIT-990) concedes for one measure, without bearing on comparisons made within a frame. It bears on CLAIM-174’s tests 2 and 3, whose frame-relativity that claim already concedes. Against THEORY-071 it changes the subject from self-individuation to observer-drawn boundaries rather than refuting it.