# An Agent is a Worldline in Tegmark V

If asked to define what an _agent_ is, my usual answer -- one of them, anyway -- is “a [worldline](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_line) in Tegmark V”.

The Tegmark Level V Multiverse (the “V” here is a Roman numeral) is not defined by [Max Tegmark](https://arxiv.org/pdf/0905.1283.pdf) (whose hierarchy goes only up to IV), but, as used in agent-foundations circles, it refers to the collection of not-necessarily-consistent mathematical universes, a.k.a. “impossible possible worlds”. It thus contains worlds in which 1+1 = 3, worlds in which triangles have four sides, and perhaps worlds with married bachelors -- in addition, of course, to all the more “ordinary” worlds in Tegmark Levels I-IV (and thus, in particular, us).

This definition of “agent” is intended to evoke the concept of an _observer_ in physics (especially relativity), which is a worldline in physical spacetime. “Observer” is a more passive word than “agent”, corresponding to the fact that in physics, worldlines are determined by equations (the “equations of motion”) that represent the laws of physics; whereas the idea in _agent theory_ is that the corresponding equations -- those that determine worldlines -- represent the preferences, or “caring structure”, of some entity other than (at any rate, not necessarily identical to) the physical universe.

(I am deliberately avoiding the terms “values” and “goals”, for obscure theoretical reasons that I won’t explain here.)

A worldline in Tegmark IV (to say nothing of V) would, almost by its very nature, suggest a higher degree of “agency” than the ordinary sort of worldline, because it would allow for the possibility that the “observer” or “agent” moves between universes with differing laws of physics. Were we ever to acquire the capacity of “hacking into” our universe and changing its physical laws, for example, this would be the sort of mathematical setting in which our activities would be appropriately modeled. The equations governing our trajectories in that case would be reasonably termed “laws of metaphysics” -- or, indeed (in the most general case at least), “laws of mathematics”.

Importantly, note that this setting enables us to _reason counterfactually about physical laws_ (that is, about “metaphysical location”), in exactly the same way that ordinary physics allows us to reason counterfactually about physical location (e.g., “if I were _here_ at _this_ time, then I would be _there_ at _that_ time”).

The next step in this progression, Tegmark-V worldlines, might seem absurd at first: hacking into the laws of mathematics, and traveling into the world where 1+1=3? But the subject of _logical uncertainty_, and in particular _logical counterfactuals_, has indeed been receiving attention lately. Essentially, it arises out of situations in which agents need to construct _models_ \-\- that is, maps that aren’t the territory -- not only of the physical world, but of mathematical truths: for example, to reason about how their own or other agents’ “source code” works. In other words, situations in which agents reason about agency.

Doing so is tantamount to reasoning counterfactually about the laws of mathematics. Consequently, reasoning about agency -- something that we would like agents to be able to do, as a result of our having done so -- is equivalent to reasoning about the “physics” of Tegmark V: meta-metaphysics, or metamathematics.