# Environmental Legibility **Environmental legibility** is the degree to which an organism or person can construct an adequately accurate and actionable model of the environment in which it must live. The concept joins perception, prediction, causal understanding, choice, control, and the ability to revise mistaken beliefs. Bryant McGill's [[thoughts/The Right to Understand Your World|The Right to Understand Your World]] develops environmental legibility as a **preconstitutional mammalian interest**. The argument begins from predictive processing, information seeking, and the effects of controllability: knowing enough about the environment to orient and act is part of the machinery of agency. An **asymmetry of environmental legibility** exists when an institution constructs an increasingly detailed model of a person or population while withholding the rules, classifications, relationships, and decision processes through which the institution acts upon them. ## Relationships - **biological basis:** [[wiki/Internal Model|Internal Model]], [[wiki/Predictive Processing|Predictive Processing]], and [[wiki/Information Seeking|Information Seeking]]. - **agency basis:** [[wiki/Predictability and Controllability|Predictability and Controllability]] and [[wiki/Agency|Agency]]. - **institutional asymmetry:** [[wiki/Information Asymmetry|Information Asymmetry]], [[wiki/Machine-Readable Environment|Machine-Readable Environment]], and [[wiki/Informational Domination|Informational Domination]]. - **collection relevance:** [[collections/Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and the Intelligence Environment|Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and the Intelligence Environment]]. ## Sources / Provenance - [[thoughts/The Right to Understand Your World|The Right to Understand Your World]] - [Keller and Mrsic-Flogel — Predictive Processing: A Canonical Cortical Computation, 2018](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6400266/) - [Monosov et al. — Neural circuitry of information seeking, 2020](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7928425/) **As of:** 2026-09-23