Ontic state recovery through prediction

Ping Zhang, Quang-Huy Nguyen, Yingtie Lei, Wei-Lun Chao

We encounter a system through its responses, yet its state concerns how the system is. Predicting further responses promises knowledge beyond what is immediately observed. What that knowledge tells us about the system's state depends on what we mean by a state in the first place. We give this notion a model-relative meaning: a state is the complete response profile over a specified query universe, and configurations agreeing on every query are regarded as the same state. From this perspective, a learned state is understood through the distinctions between these profiles that it retains. Prediction concerns selected observations; recovery concerns the profile as a whole. We examine their relationship through query ambiguity, state-space geometry, and the choice of prediction targets. Synthetic systems with known response laws and neural recordings provide complementary settings for this investigation. The aim is to clarify how prediction can become a way of knowing a system, and what it would mean for a learned state to preserve the state being studied.