My impression is that all this time business in decision making is more of an artifact of computing solutions to constraint problems (unlike in physics, where it’s actually an important concept). There is a process of computation that works with things such as propositions about the world, which are sometimes events in the physical sense, and the process goes through these events in the world in some order, often against physical time. But it’s more like construction of Kleene fixpoints or some more elaborate thing like tracing statements in a control flow graph or Abstracting Abstract Machines, a particular way of solving a constraint problem that describes the situation, than anything characterising the phenomenon of finding solutions in general. Or perhaps just going up in some domain in something like Scott semantics of a computation, for whatever reason, getting more detailed information about its behavior. “The order in domains” seems like the most relevant meaning for time in decision making, which isn’t a whole lot like time.
(Edit May 2022: I now take this more seriously, with logical time and updatelessness motivating looking into reasoning in spaces similar to Scott domains. That is, perhaps agents should reason in a way compatible with a notion of logical time, not just be describable this way as computations.)
My impression is that all this time business in decision making is more of an artifact of computing solutions to constraint problems (unlike in physics, where it’s actually an important concept). There is a process of computation that works with things such as propositions about the world, which are sometimes events in the physical sense, and the process goes through these events in the world in some order, often against physical time. But it’s more like construction of Kleene fixpoints or some more elaborate thing like tracing statements in a control flow graph or Abstracting Abstract Machines, a particular way of solving a constraint problem that describes the situation, than anything characterising the phenomenon of finding solutions in general. Or perhaps just going up in some domain in something like Scott semantics of a computation, for whatever reason, getting more detailed information about its behavior. “The order in domains” seems like the most relevant meaning for time in decision making, which isn’t a whole lot like time.
(Edit May 2022: I now take this more seriously, with logical time and updatelessness motivating looking into reasoning in spaces similar to Scott domains. That is, perhaps agents should reason in a way compatible with a notion of logical time, not just be describable this way as computations.)