Maximally coherent agents are indistinguishable from point particles. They have no internal degrees of freedom, one cannot probe their internal structure from the outside.

Epistemic Status: Unhinged

No, I am not sure!

But the argument is not: 'Shrimp are hard to locate'. The claim is: Shrimp experience (1) consists of quite few bits and (2) is still compressible. Therefore we can expect them to be generated by a quite short program that is plausibly shorter than K(our physics + initial conditions + locator). And if you think shrimp have too complex experiences, then feel free to insert e.g. 'planaria' or 'bacteria'.

Does that clarify?

UDASSA: There Are No Shrimp In This Universe

In UDASSA, the most likely explanation for your experiences is the shortest program that generates them. For sufficiently complex experiences, this probably looks like: laws of physics + initial conditions + a locator pointing to you within the simulation.

But take shrimp: They evolved brains, which means their experiential stream has structure worth predicting. So it's compressible. The shortest program that generates shrimp-experience probably isn't "our laws of physics + initial conditions + a locator for this particular shrimp." Plausibly a much simpler program would produce the same output.

If so, almost all the measure on shrimp-like experiences doesn't route through our universe, but through simpler Turing machines. The shrimp you see swimming around are exponentially downweighted rounding errors, the overwhelming majority of shrimp-kind lives elsewhere.

Corollary: you are also someone's shrimp.

From discussion with @Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel 

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zXSrxoKdczNAktcr5/deep-learning-and-precipitation-reactions-a-tale-of

Have a look at this.

Very, very cool! Excited to read the paper. Perfect for nerd-sniping my condensed matter friends into working on alignment :)

Excellent! Thank you!

Coherence as Purpose

Epistemic Status: Riffing

We know coherence when we see it. A craftsman working versus someone constantly fixing his previous mistakes. A functional organization versus bureaucratic churn. A healthy body versus one fighting itself. War, internal conflict, rework: these are wasteful. We respect people who act decisively, societies that build without tearing down, systems that run clean.

This intuition points somewhere real. In some sense, maximizing/expanding coherence is what the universe does: cutting friction, eliminating waste, building systems that don't fight themselves. Not from external design, but because coherent systems expand until they can't. Each pocket of coherence is the universe organizing itself better. The point is that coherence captures "good": low friction, low conflict, no self-sabotage.

I propose that this is measurable. Coherence could be quantified as thermodynamic efficiency. Pick a boundary and time window, track energy in. The coherent part becomes exported work, heat above ambient, or durable stores (raised water, charged batteries, separated materials). The rest is loss: waste heat, rework, reversals. Systems can expand until efficiency stops generating surplus. When new coordination tools raise that limit, growth resumes. Just observable flows, no goals needed.

An interesting coincidency: maximizing thermodynamic efficiency (coherence) maximally delays heat death of a system. Higher efficiency means slower entropy increase.

I am very interested in hearing counterexamples of coherent systems that are intuitively repellent!

Edit: Had a talk with a physicist: This is in fact the same as the system minimizing entropy production rate! Possibly that this could serve as a more operationally tractable (and fundamental) foundation to agency, as opposed to beliefs, goals, actions, utility etc. An a structure that, if present in a system, minimizes the rate of entropy production. i.e. maximally slows neg-entropy consumption.

It would also be quite interesting to look at how coherence scales with system size, and if/when this imposes a limit on growth.

Great post! A thought: we seem able to intuitively differentiate coherent and incoherent behavior even without knowing the terminal goal. Humans, for instance, visibly differ in how "coherent" they are, which we can infer from local observations alone. My conjecture is that coherence might overlap substantially with thermodynamic efficiency. If behavior is optimal for some terminal value, it must satisfy local Bellman-type consistency (no value loops). I suspect this has a physical parallel: where those local constraints hold tightly, you should see few avoidable losses (high Carnot efficiency); where they fail, you should find loss hotspots (rework, backtracking, waste heat). The local inconsistencies you describe might correspond directly to local inefficiencies, regions of high irreversibility.

Is there an anthropic reason or computational (solomonoff-pilled) argument for why we would expect to the computational/causal graph of the universe to be this local (sparse)? Or at least appear local to a first approximation. (Bells-inequality)

This seems like a quite special property: I suspect that ether

• it is not as rare in e.g. the solomonoff prior as we might first intuit, or
• we should expect this for anthropic resons e.g. it is really hard to develop intelligence/do precidctions in nonlocal universes.