Condensation: a theory of concepts

Sam Eisenstat

Keywords: concept, meaning, agent foundations, probability, latent variable, information theory, structural causal model

TL;DR: We prove an "intersubectivity theorem", showing that under certain hypotheses, different systems of latent variables stand in a kind of correspondence.

Abstract: We understand agents as creating concepts in order to organize their understanding of the world. Often agents share concepts, and so are able to work out how to make sense of the world together, forming language communities. Here, we aim to model these phenomena, looking at how probability distributions can be organized by introducing appropriate latent variables. Our main result shows that under certain information-theoretic hypotheses, different systems of latent variables stand in a kind of correspondence.

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Submission Number: 12