[FRIAM] When are telic attributions appropriate in physical descriptions?

[Jon Zingale]

from:
https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/2024-August/095951.html

'I think I understand "agential aspiration" but am struggling with
"calculation where a final state is an input"...Is it not the co-evolution
of "the agent" and "the agent's context" which drives these systems
forward?'

Steve,

Perhaps it is only going to add to the confusion here, but here I go. My
confusion with the elided summary above is with the word _it_ in 'is it
not'. Does _it_ refer to "calculation where a final state is an input" or
some latently assumed and agreed upon model of the world?

Identifying all possible models as being agent-based models ultimately
hides the distinction as I would make it and a distinction that I assume
you are seeking. In my reading, *telic* in the sense of "calculation where
a final state is an input" exactly identifies what escapes agency
(including "context" as some kind of complementary agent). This connotation
is exactly what makes a thesis like "On the unity of Ukraine and Russia" or
"On the unity of China and Taiwan" so devious. The affects of such a thesis
become intangible to those fully inhabiting their agent-based selves.

An agent in the world attempts to lift their *telos* to the level of the
models governing type theory, which is fundamentally a different kind of
thing than *telos* as consequences in some embodiment of the the theory.

Without going too far in a direction I have been thinking about lately, I
assume we would agree that a *glider* as it appears in Conway's game has no
intrinsic meaning when lifted to the governing theory of computation which
founds Conway's game. This is despite the use Conway made of *gliders* via
*Gosper glider guns* to establish an *interpretation* of logical operators.

When lifting to the type theory via a Lang functor, one exactly loses the
sense of a glider even though one can effectively *recover* it when
completing the round trip back via the Syn functor, but only at a "higher
level" of GOL made of GOL (analogous to what happens under double
dualization of general vector spaces and not JUST finite dimensional vector
spaces).

For reference: https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/syntactic+category
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