The Realization Setting

The mathematical question is not whether one machine can store an account of its environment. It is whether the account supports the questions, operations, corrections, and changes of representation to which the machine is committed. A description can be internally consistent and still fail to determine the information its consumer requires. It can encode an exact local state while being incompatible with another view of the same purported object. Conversely, a coarse representation can discard most of the ambient variables and preserve every continuation relevant to a declared task.