When New Experience Leads to New Knowledge: A Computational Framework for Formalizing Epistemically Transformative Experiences.

The discovery of a new kind of experience can teach an agent what that kind of experience is like. Such a discovery can be epistemically transformative, teaching an agent something they could not have learned without having that kind of experience. However, learning something new does not always require new experience. In some cases, an agent can merely expand their existing knowledge using, e.g., inference or imagination that draws on prior knowledge. We present a computational framework, grounded in the language of partially observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs), to formalize this distinction. We propose that epistemically transformative experiences leave a measurable "signature" distinguishing them from experiences that are not epistemically transformative. For epistemically transformative experiences, learning in a new environment may be comparable to "learning from scratch" (since prior knowledge has become obsolete). In contrast, for experiences that are not transformative, learning in a new environment can be facilitated by prior knowledge of that same kind (since new knowledge can be built upon the old). We demonstrate this in a synthetic experiment inspired by Edwin Abbott's Flatland, where an agent learns to navigate a 2D world and is subsequently transferred either to a 3D world (epistemically transformative change) or to an expanded 2D world (epistemically non-transformative change). Beyond the contribution to understanding epistemic change, our work shows how tools in computational cognitive science can formalize and evaluate philosophical intuitions in new ways.