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arxiv 1902.09469 v3 pith:63YQW4TT submitted 2019-02-25 cs.AI

classification cs.AI
keywords environmentagentsmustembeddedmodelspartsreasonthemselves
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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Traditional models of rational action treat the agent as though it is cleanly separated from its environment, and can act on that environment from the outside. Such agents have a known functional relationship with their environment, can model their environment in every detail, and do not need to reason about themselves or their internal parts. We provide an informal survey of obstacles to formalizing good reasoning for agents embedded in their environment. Such agents must optimize an environment that is not of type "function"; they must rely on models that fit within the modeled environment; and they must reason about themselves as just another physical system, made of parts that can be modified and that can work at cross purposes.

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Cited by 3 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. Safety from Honesty in a Disinterested AI Predictor

    cs.AI 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 7.0 of 10

    Under consequence-invariant posterior training and sparsity of coordinated harm patterns, the training mass on dangerous guarded Predictors is bounded by C_bad times R_shell.

  2. A game theory for foundation models shows new paths to rational cooperation through similarity inference

    cs.AI 2026-08 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Foundation-model agents that plan by predicting both the world and themselves can rationally cooperate in one-shot social dilemmas by inferring behavioral similarity from interaction history.

  3. Towards chemistries in dynamical systems

    cs.DM 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A finite dynamical system can be described as a Petri-net chemistry when a token map and transition map are compatible; an optional uniqueness criterion restricts when this description is least ambiguous.

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