claim
active
claim:the-boundary-between-agent-and-environment-is-not-a-physical-object-discovered-in-the-world-but-a-modelling-choiceThe boundary between agent and environment is not a physical object discovered in the world but a modelling choice
Established via Zanardi (2002) and the Hamiltonian decomposition argument in §2.1; foundational for the emptiness formalisation
Source paper
extracted_from(2026) · Lars Sandved-Smith · Chris Fields · Thomas Doctor · Ruben Laukkonen +1
Neighborhood — ranked by edge-count
Findings (1)
finding
- Establishes that the boundary is a modelling choice not determined by the underlying physics
Concepts (1)
concept
- Hilbert Space FactorisationsupportsThe total Hamiltonian is equally consistent with any factorisation; establishes the boundary as a modelling choice not a physical fact
Claims (1)
claim
- Core claim of the paper; derives from Corollary 3.1 of Fields & Glazebrook (2023)
Related by similarity (8)
cosine ≥ 0.65 · no typed edgeEntities in the same semantic neighborhood but without a typed relation to this one — candidates for new edges or unrecognized duplicates.
- The demarcation that would separate an agent from its environment, which the paper argues is unevidenceable.
- Central thesis: the self-environment cut cannot be self-evidencing.
- "The boundary is the medium through which all evidence flows, but it is not itself evidenceable."quote0.815Pithy statement of the core impossibility result in its first-person experiential implication
- The idea that the agent can be distinguished as an entity separate from its environment.
- The central question the paper answers negatively via quantum information theory
- Consequence of the no-self-measurement result; the boundary cannot be empirically established.