Control

[smoothmoniker]

Cat

Yeah, I’m still not really sure what the primary question is, so I’m going to cover my ignorance by using a lot of big words, like coruscation.

One of the prevailing theories of human behavior is that we function within Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI). Belief refers to our accumulated understanding of how the world works – all of the facts, principles, and concepts that we have access to in our person. Desires are sometimes more properly stated as Goals – the things we want to accomplish. Intention refers to the exercise of our agency to work toward our goals within out beliefs.

If I believe that a chair exists, that it is capable of supporting my weight, and I desire to sit down, my intention is to sit on that chair.

We rarely desire bad things – most people desire good things. We desire peace, to be loved, to be of consequence in someone else’s life. The problem is, we always have incomplete and inaccurate beliefs about the world. When we seek to control our circumstances, we are operating with a complete set of true information, and so we enact intentions that are not always good or helpful.

This is actually the basis for most Software Agency design work right now (Artificial Intelligence). Pollack and others are working to build systems that are able to assimilate incomplete information and establish an edifice of knowledge (beliefs), establish goals, and construct intentions to accomplish those goals within the given beliefs.

-sm