Comment by astrange
11 hours ago
He seems stuck in the GOFAI development philosophy where they just decide humans have something called a "world model" because they said so, and then decide that if they just develop some random thing and call it a "world model" it'll create intelligence because it has the same name as the thing they made up.
And of course it doesn't work. Humans don't have world models. There's no such thing as a world model!
I don't think the focus is really on world models, rather than on animal intelligence based around predicting the real world, but to predict it you need to model it in some sense.
IMO the issue is that animals can't have a specific "world model" system, because if you create a model ahead of time you will mostly waste energy because most of the model is not used.
And animals' main concern is energy conservation, so they must be doing something else.
There are many factors playing into "survival of the fittest", and energy conservation is only one. Animals build mental models to predict the world because this superpower of seeing into the future is critical to survival - predict where the water is in a drought, where the food is, and how to catch it, etc, etc.
The animal learns as it encounters learning signals - prediction failure - which is the only way to do it. Of course you need to learn/remember something before you can use that in the future, so in that sense it's "ahead of time", but the reason it's done that way because evolution has found that learning patterns will ultimately prove beneficial.
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