Why do we care about abstractions?

The pointers problem

Open questions about natural abstractions

Prerequisites

Natural Latents

Reading: Abstractions as redundant information

Reading: The minimal latents approach

Reading: Natural latents — the concepts

Exercises: Natural latents

Exercise 1: Mediation error as conditional total correlation

Exercise 2: Redundancy and the Pareto frontier of naturality

Exercise 3: Minimal mediators, maximal redunds, and uniqueness

Condensation

Reading: Condensation

Exercises: Condensation and natural latents

Exercise 1: Weak natural latents from condensation

Exercise 2: Weak redundancy

Exercise 3: Strong natural latents

Exercise 4: Natural latents yield condensations

Exercise 5: Hierarchical natural latent models

Softwareness and Factor Space Models

Reading: Softwareness in the natural world

Reading: Factored space models

Further topics

Further reading

• The Plan (2023) — understanding abstraction as a robust bottleneck
• Ontology identification problem
• Natural latents: latent variables stable across ontologies