CONCEPT
Frame Problem (Damasio reading)
The classical philosophical puzzle of how any reasoning system determines what is relevant — which Damasio's framework answers: in biological organisms, the body solves the frame problem through feeling.
The frame problem, originating in AI research in the 1960s, names the difficulty any rational agent faces in determining which considerations are relevant to a decision. A purely computational approach confronts an infinite regress: before analyzing options, one must decide which factors matter; that decision requires prior evaluative commitments that cannot be derived from the data alone. Damasio's framework provides a biological answer: the body solves the frame problem through somatic markers, which narrow the infinite field of possible considerations to the subset the organism's accumulated experience has flagged as consequential. Feeling is the frame.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The frame problem was first articulated by John McCarthy and Patrick Hayes in 1969 in the context of symbolic AI, where it described the difficulty of specifying which aspects of a situation change and which remain constant after an action. Jerry Fodor and Daniel Dennett later generalized the problem to cover any form of cognition that requires