Definition
Plain language
The thinker who argued in 1943 that a mind works by carrying a small-scale model of reality so it can try things out in thought before doing them.
As stated in the literature
Kenneth Craik, whose 1943 proposal that organisms maintain an internal model of the world to simulate actions before executing them is invoked as the conceptual ancestor of world-model planning in language-model agents.
Also called: Craik
Why it matters: His notion that minds carry an inner model of the world underpins the modern push to build planning-by-simulation into AI agents.
For example, Craik's idea is like rehearsing a chess move in your head, picturing the board after it, before you actually touch a piece.
Heard on the show
“The paper actually reaches all the way back to a 1943 idea from Kenneth Craik — that a mind carries a small-scale model of reality so it can try actions out in thought before doing them for real.”Episode 183 — Why You Can't Fine-Tune Foresight Into an AI Agent