[astrange]

There's no such thing as a world model. People do not have world models.

This is a confused term made up by 70s AI researchers, who had the continual problem that they didn't know any philosophy and kept making up their own metaphors for how intelligence might work, and then deciding that because they'd made it up it must be true, and also that if they wrote a computer program that had the same metaphors it must work.

"World model" just vaguely points at something people might do and assumes that if you make up a new thing it vaguely points at it'd help.

[Jensson]

On what basis are you saying that? I have a model in my head mapping out the world around me, so I know where things are etc and what I can do with all those things. How is that not a world model? Are you using a very strange definition of "world model"?

[astrange]

> On what basis are you saying that?

This is a longstanding critique of GOFAI; see Hubert Dreyfuss and Phil Agre.

https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/agre/critical.html

> I have a model in my head mapping out the world around me, so I know where things are etc and what I can do with all those things.

No you don't; a map is not the territory, and is necessarily wrong, which means that if you had such a model and were actually relying on it you wouldn't be able to do things you obviously can do in real life.

You have an inaccurate memory of the world and you update it, only as much as you need to[0], as you go, in order to do a specific task.

[0] probably a little less than you need to, because you want to save thinking energy

[Jensson]

> No you don't; a map is not the territory, and is necessarily wrong, which means that if you had such a model and were actually relying on it you wouldn't be able to do things you obviously can do in real life.

What are you talking about, a world model doesn't need to be perfect, nobody said humans has a perfect world model just that we have a world model.

Yes we update the model and adjust when it is wrong, but we still have a world model we use to plan out actions before we do them. I can very accurately predict all the events that will happen when I cook food, how the water will flow etc, sometimes things go wrong and I adjust and fix, but there is no way I could cook food if I didn't have that world model to plan out actions.

> This is a longstanding critique of GOFAI; see Hubert Dreyfuss and Phil Agre.

They don't even mention world model there, I think you are talking about something completely different. No, the mental model humans have of the world isn't the real world, we know that, it is a model of the world, ie a world model. A model isn't the real thing, that is why we call it a model.