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  Zakery Mizell revised criticism #5123.

Natural selection requires differential replication, not death. (Death is just an form of extreme differential replication, when compared to any allele that does replicate.)

Natural selection requires differential replication, not death. (Death is just an extreme form of differential replication, when compared to any allele that does replicate.)

  Zakery Mizell criticized idea #5089.

Knowledge growth (such as in genes in the biosphere, or in a person) can only proceed by conjecture and criticism -- variation and selection. In a system which can create knowledge, but has not yet, there are no modes of substantive criticism available, since that would itself require knowledge. So how can the system create knowledge at all? Because although substantive criticism is not yet possible, the crudest form of full-on refutation is: the destruction of the information medium on which a conjecture is based, i.e., death. Death is the only "undesigned" refutation. So any initial knowledge created in an otherwise empty knowledge-creating system can only be that relating to how to avoid death in the local environment. This is the knowledge which defines replicators.

#5089​·​Tyler MillsOP, 6 days ago

Natural selection requires differential replication, not death. (Death is just an form of extreme differential replication, when compared to any allele that does replicate.)

  Benjamin Davies criticized idea #5102.

Conversely, non-inferential novelty does not follow by any inference or deduction; it is not implicit in existing knowledge, so it is not in any set of knowledge's implication space (except that of the laws of physics...).

Knowledge which is novel in this way is what constitutes creation in the sense we mean in epistemology. The two known examples of non-inferential knowledge growth are biological evolution and some of the thinking which takes place in the minds of people (human or AGI).

Any given set of knowledge cannot grow itself non-inferentially. There must be a source of novelty, of variation, that is epistemically external to it.
If we take that claim as general, then the mutation of DNA constituting the creation/novelty/knowledge-growth in biology is a specific instance: cosmic ray strikes and errors in copying due to chemistry are sources of variation not caused by the DNA’s knowledge).

#5102​·​Tyler MillsOP, 3 days ago

Did you mean "Any given set of knowledge cannot grow itself inferentially"?

  Benjamin Davies criticized idea #5089.

Knowledge growth (such as in genes in the biosphere, or in a person) can only proceed by conjecture and criticism -- variation and selection. In a system which can create knowledge, but has not yet, there are no modes of substantive criticism available, since that would itself require knowledge. So how can the system create knowledge at all? Because although substantive criticism is not yet possible, the crudest form of full-on refutation is: the destruction of the information medium on which a conjecture is based, i.e., death. Death is the only "undesigned" refutation. So any initial knowledge created in an otherwise empty knowledge-creating system can only be that relating to how to avoid death in the local environment. This is the knowledge which defines replicators.

#5089​·​Tyler MillsOP, 6 days ago

I think it is a mistake to say or imply that variation and selection IS conjecture and criticism. At best C&C is the subset of V&S that occurs in minds. The biosphere doesn’t actually conjecture anything.

  Tyler Mills commented on idea #5118.

An example of this is prices in a market: a price communicates information about (or caused by) knowledge in a system while being agnostic to the content; the specifics and interactions of the target knowledge are abstracted away, so any changes made by sources receiving the price information remain blind to the target, and therefore can remain a source of novelty to them (the prices themselves are not a source of novelty; they are a means of retaining a causal relationship while preventing the “collapse” of two epistemic systems into one)...

#5118​·​Tyler MillsOP, about 14 hours ago

Any relation in all this to entanglement and decoherence? In the picture laid out here, the non-specificity of feedback seems to be preventing decoherence of a sort...

  Tyler Mills commented on idea #5113.

Conjecture: a source of variation with its own knowledge can remain blind and external to its target while nonetheless receiving feedback from the target, so long as the feedback is non-specific to any content in the target.

#5113​·​Tyler MillsOP, 2 days ago

I.e., information caused (if only partially) by some source can be "content independent" w.r.t. that source in a similar sense to how information itself is substrate independent.

  Tyler Mills commented on idea #5113.

Conjecture: a source of variation with its own knowledge can remain blind and external to its target while nonetheless receiving feedback from the target, so long as the feedback is non-specific to any content in the target.

#5113​·​Tyler MillsOP, 2 days ago

An example of this is prices in a market: a price communicates information about (or caused by) knowledge in a system while being agnostic to the content; the specifics and interactions of the target knowledge are abstracted away, so any changes made by sources receiving the price information remain blind to the target, and therefore can remain a source of novelty to them (the prices themselves are not a source of novelty; they are a means of retaining a causal relationship while preventing the “collapse” of two epistemic systems into one)...

  Dennis Hackethal addressed criticism #5116.

should_adopt? and pending_criticisms are implemented in terms of each other. Doesn’t that cause an infinite regress?

#5116​·​Dennis HackethalOP, about 19 hours ago

No because 1) there’s always a finite amount of deeply nested criticisms, and 2) the discussion graph is acyclic.

  Dennis Hackethal criticized idea #5114.

Recursive Epistemology

Veritula implements a recursive epistemology. For a criticism to be pending, it can’t have any pending criticisms itself, and so on, in a deeply nested fashion.

ruby
def should_adopt? idea

  pending_criticisms(idea).none?

end



def pending_criticisms idea

  criticisms(idea).filter { |c| should_adopt?(c) }

end



def criticisms idea

  children(idea).filter(&:criticism?)

end

This approach is different from non-recursive epistemologies, which handle criticisms differently. For example, they might not consider deeply nested criticisms when determining whether an idea is currently criticized.

#5114​·​Dennis HackethalOP revised about 19 hours ago

should_adopt? and pending_criticisms are implemented in terms of each other. Doesn’t that cause an infinite regress?

  Dennis Hackethal revised idea #1949.

Simplify code

Recursive Epistemology

Veritula implements a recursive epistemology. For a criticism to be pending, it can’t have any pending criticisms itself, and so on, in a deeply nested fashion.

ruby
def criticized? idea

  pending_criticisms(idea).any?

end



def pending_criticisms idea

  criticisms(idea).filter { |c| pending_criticisms(c).none? }

end



def criticisms idea

  children(idea).filter(&:criticism?)

end

This approach is different from non-recursive epistemologies, which handle criticisms differently. For example, they might not consider deeply nested criticisms when determining whether an idea is currently criticized.

Recursive Epistemology

Veritula implements a recursive epistemology. For a criticism to be pending, it can’t have any pending criticisms itself, and so on, in a deeply nested fashion.

ruby
def should_adopt? idea

  pending_criticisms(idea).none?

end



def pending_criticisms idea

  criticisms(idea).filter { |c| should_adopt?(c) }

end



def criticisms idea

  children(idea).filter(&:criticism?)

end

This approach is different from non-recursive epistemologies, which handle criticisms differently. For example, they might not consider deeply nested criticisms when determining whether an idea is currently criticized.

  Tyler Mills commented on idea #5112.

Creativity (or “creation” or non-inferential novelty) is occurring in a system iff the system is being altered by a second system that is epistemically separated from it (its changes are nonspecific to the information content of the first system).

#5112​·​Tyler MillsOP, 2 days ago

Conjecture: a source of variation with its own knowledge can remain blind and external to its target while nonetheless receiving feedback from the target, so long as the feedback is non-specific to any content in the target.

  Tyler Mills commented on idea #5111.

But if the source of variation only makes changes that are blind–that do not depend on the specific content of the target–then its implication space remains separate from the target’s. It is changing the target's implication space (its set of counterfactuals...), serving as a source of novelty for the target, while its own implication space is unchanged.

#5111​·​Tyler MillsOP, 2 days ago

Creativity (or “creation” or non-inferential novelty) is occurring in a system iff the system is being altered by a second system that is epistemically separated from it (its changes are nonspecific to the information content of the first system).

  Tyler Mills commented on idea #5109.

If changes are not blind, the changer is changing based on the content of the knowledge in the target, in which case the two have a joint implication space: their possible states are all implicit in the system, and there are no states that are novel with respect to either of them; creativity is not possible. It’s like two differently charged conductors coming into contact and neutralizing the electric field between them. An "epistemic capacitor."

#5109​·​Tyler MillsOP revised 2 days ago

But if the source of variation only makes changes that are blind–that do not depend on the specific content of the target–then its implication space remains separate from the target’s. It is changing the target's implication space (its set of counterfactuals...), serving as a source of novelty for the target, while its own implication space is unchanged.

  Tyler Mills revised idea #5108.

If changes are not blind, the changer is changing based on the content of the knowledge in the target, in which case the two have a joint implication space: their possible states are all implicit in the system, and there are no states that are novel with respect to either of them; creativity is not possible. It’s like two differently charged conductors coming into contact and neutralizing the electric field between them.

If changes are not blind, the changer is changing based on the content of the knowledge in the target, in which case the two have a joint implication space: their possible states are all implicit in the system, and there are no states that are novel with respect to either of them; creativity is not possible. It’s like two differently charged conductors coming into contact and neutralizing the electric field between them. An "epistemic capacitor."

  Tyler Mills commented on idea #5107.

That these external sources of variation in the case of DNA do not themselves contain knowledge is happenstance, another special case. A source of variation acting on a given set of knowledge can be knowledge-bearing while still being epistemically external to the target (making only blind changes to it), so long as the variations do not depend on the specific content of the knowledge in the target. So: set A is altered by set B, each are knowledge-containing, but knowledge in B does not pertain to A.

#5107​·​Tyler MillsOP, 2 days ago

If changes are not blind, the changer is changing based on the content of the knowledge in the target, in which case the two have a joint implication space: their possible states are all implicit in the system, and there are no states that are novel with respect to either of them; creativity is not possible. It’s like two differently charged conductors coming into contact and neutralizing the electric field between them.

  Tyler Mills commented on idea #5106.

For the changes made by a source of variation to be dependent on the content of any knowledge in the target, the source would have to contain knowledge itself. (The DNA mutation sources do not.) Blind changes are dependent on the medium in which information is contained, like an A versus a G in a strand of DNA (assuming these are information media). But the change made to the A or G by the cosmic ray is independent of the information they are hosting, if any. Any changes by the ray are dependent on the physical/chemical structure of the target, the substrate. Information is substrate independent. It is not the information stored in the A or G that is determining what changes are made to them.

#5106​·​Tyler MillsOP, 3 days ago

That these external sources of variation in the case of DNA do not themselves contain knowledge is happenstance, another special case. A source of variation acting on a given set of knowledge can be knowledge-bearing while still being epistemically external to the target (making only blind changes to it), so long as the variations do not depend on the specific content of the knowledge in the target. So: set A is altered by set B, each are knowledge-containing, but knowledge in B does not pertain to A.

  Tyler Mills commented on idea #5104.

The externally-derived sources of variation/novelty in the case of DNA (cosmic rays and failures in copying due to chemistry) are blind: they do not interact (epistemically) with the knowledge of the system. That is, their changes are independent of the knowledge in the system. This is what makes these sources epistemically separate.

#5104​·​Tyler MillsOP revised 3 days ago

For the changes made by a source of variation to be dependent on the content of any knowledge in the target, the source would have to contain knowledge itself. (The DNA mutation sources do not.) Blind changes are dependent on the medium in which information is contained, like an A versus a G in a strand of DNA (assuming these are information media). But the change made to the A or G by the cosmic ray is independent of the information they are hosting, if any. Any changes by the ray are dependent on the physical/chemical structure of the target, the substrate. Information is substrate independent. It is not the information stored in the A or G that is determining what changes are made to them.

  Tyler Mills revised idea #5103.

The externally-derived sources of variation/novelty in the case of DNA (cosmic rays and failures in copying due to chemistry) are blind: they do not interact (epistemically) with the knowledge of the system.

The externally-derived sources of variation/novelty in the case of DNA (cosmic rays and failures in copying due to chemistry) are blind: they do not interact (epistemically) with the knowledge of the system. That is, their changes are independent of the knowledge in the system. This is what makes these sources epistemically separate.

  Tyler Mills commented on idea #5102.

Conversely, non-inferential novelty does not follow by any inference or deduction; it is not implicit in existing knowledge, so it is not in any set of knowledge's implication space (except that of the laws of physics...).

Knowledge which is novel in this way is what constitutes creation in the sense we mean in epistemology. The two known examples of non-inferential knowledge growth are biological evolution and some of the thinking which takes place in the minds of people (human or AGI).

Any given set of knowledge cannot grow itself non-inferentially. There must be a source of novelty, of variation, that is epistemically external to it.
If we take that claim as general, then the mutation of DNA constituting the creation/novelty/knowledge-growth in biology is a specific instance: cosmic ray strikes and errors in copying due to chemistry are sources of variation not caused by the DNA’s knowledge).

#5102​·​Tyler MillsOP, 3 days ago

The externally-derived sources of variation/novelty in the case of DNA (cosmic rays and failures in copying due to chemistry) are blind: they do not interact (epistemically) with the knowledge of the system.

  Tyler Mills posted idea #5102.

Conversely, non-inferential novelty does not follow by any inference or deduction; it is not implicit in existing knowledge, so it is not in any set of knowledge's implication space (except that of the laws of physics...).

Knowledge which is novel in this way is what constitutes creation in the sense we mean in epistemology. The two known examples of non-inferential knowledge growth are biological evolution and some of the thinking which takes place in the minds of people (human or AGI).

Any given set of knowledge cannot grow itself non-inferentially. There must be a source of novelty, of variation, that is epistemically external to it.
If we take that claim as general, then the mutation of DNA constituting the creation/novelty/knowledge-growth in biology is a specific instance: cosmic ray strikes and errors in copying due to chemistry are sources of variation not caused by the DNA’s knowledge).

  Tyler Mills posted idea #5101.

Claim: It is useful (if not crucial) to distinguish between two notions of novelty: inferential and non-inferential.

Knowledge that is inferentially novel may never have been seen before, but was already implicit in existing knowledge; it results from application and composition of existing knowledge (e.g. the running of programs). What is novel in this way can be instantiated without any external epistemic (knowledge-related) influence. A program needs infrastructure to allow its computation to occur; it does not need another program, in an epistemic sense: If there's a dependency, we should consider the two to be part of the same "epistemic system." Let's say the dependent target has no "implication space" until its needed source is causally linked to it. The source may have its own implication space. Once "joined," a new implication space is defined.

Inferentially novel output (the instantiation of knowledge in an implication space) is all that current computer software (and all AI) is capable of. These systems "create" knowledge only in this sense.

  Dennis Hackethal addressed criticism #5096.

if somebody suggests some system they can’t put into practice, then the system is no good.

Agreed. My point is that you can't refute a flaw by saying the flaw doesn't have a workable system to resolve it. "Your boat has a hole in it". "Yeah, well I don't have any way of fixing it". That doesn't resolve the criticism of the boat. If it's unfixable and a real flaw, you might just need a new boat.

#5096​·​Sam Cymbaluk, 6 days ago

Assuming Sam did mean to criticize my opposition to assigning strengths to criticisms:

The issue isn’t that we don’t have a way to fix the hole. (We often do.)
The issue is that we have no rigorous way to tell how big the hole is. So, rather than evade criticisms by saying ‘but it’s only a small hole’, I’m saying we should always either fix holes in the boat, no matter their size, or choose a different boat.

  Dennis Hackethal addressed criticism #5096.

if somebody suggests some system they can’t put into practice, then the system is no good.

Agreed. My point is that you can't refute a flaw by saying the flaw doesn't have a workable system to resolve it. "Your boat has a hole in it". "Yeah, well I don't have any way of fixing it". That doesn't resolve the criticism of the boat. If it's unfixable and a real flaw, you might just need a new boat.

#5096​·​Sam Cymbaluk, 6 days ago

Unclear what the boat stands for.

Sam criticized my idea, so presumably he means for the boat to represent #4711. But the way his criticism is phrased, it sounds more like the boat represents the methodology of assigning strengths to criticisms.

  Tyler Mills posted idea #5098.

I wonder if there is any significance to the "distance" the laws of physics are from us, in the sense of emergence. Each quantum application of the laws of physics (conceived as discrete steps) is so far down, but maybe it need not be so. Maybe there are people in other laws of physics, where the laws are much closer at hand. Do the laws need to have a certain minimum range of emergence for personhood to be possible..? Couldn't people like us exist in a universe where fundamental physics is no more complex than the operation of our minds, or is the "breathing room" we have here necessary?

  Dennis Hackethal commented on criticism #5096.

if somebody suggests some system they can’t put into practice, then the system is no good.

Agreed. My point is that you can't refute a flaw by saying the flaw doesn't have a workable system to resolve it. "Your boat has a hole in it". "Yeah, well I don't have any way of fixing it". That doesn't resolve the criticism of the boat. If it's unfixable and a real flaw, you might just need a new boat.

#5096​·​Sam Cymbaluk, 6 days ago

To be clear, the boat represents the idea that we should judge criticisms by their strength?