In Search of Certainty by Mark Burgess

Author:Mark Burgess
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Published: 2015-03-31T16:00:00+00:00

We say a promise is autonomously made, because making a promise is a voluntary act; it comes from within an individual or a device, not by external coercion. This immediately makes it compatible with relativity, as every agent has its own private viewpoint, and knows what it knows. A promise is a declaration of an intention, so it forms a message that has to be transmitted from the originator of the intention. If the originator keeps an intention internal, then no one knows about it and nothing has been promised. It is by making networks of promises that collaboration between individual parts leads to collaborative systemic behaviour.

Intended behaviour need not be about the future; you might promise to have already fed your neighbour’s cat, or that you took out the trash, but promises make no sense if we know the outcome, so a promise has not yet been verified by the promisee. They are about incomplete information. Similarly, you might promise that it wasn’t you who let the cat out, knowing that the cat was indeed let out, but the thing to be verified is whether or not it was you who did it.

The following points help to summarize the essentials of a promise, and distinguish promises from obligations.

Every promise is made autonomously by an agent, to one or more other agents. The agent may be human, machine or a part of something else, i.e. any distinguishable object. The autonomy of agents implies that promises are made ‘voluntarily’ (the opposite of obligation).

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