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  Tyler Mills addressed criticism #5135.

None of the replicators have that information. If that quantity variable exists, it's instantiated somewhere else.

#5135​·​Tyler MillsOP, about 2 hours ago

Wouldn't it have to be instantiated in the overall system itself, which contains the replicators (among other things?)? Otherwise, how could that variable be a form of criticism by the system?

  Tyler Mills addressed criticism #5134.

How is the quantity of a replicator not based in the same medium as the replicator?

#5134​·​Tyler MillsOP, about 2 hours ago

None of the replicators have that information. If that quantity variable exists, it's instantiated somewhere else.

  Tyler Mills criticized idea #5133.

Non-specific criticisms, those not taking into account the content of their target, are always "analogue" (or quantitative as opposed to qualitative) in the sense of being based on a variable whose quantity changes in a medium distinct from that hosting the knowledge it is serving as criticism for. (E.g. capital allocation in an economy; number of instances of a replicator.)

#5133​·​Tyler MillsOP, about 2 hours ago

How is the quantity of a replicator not based in the same medium as the replicator?

  Tyler Mills commented on idea #5132.

Specific criticisms, those taking into account the content of their target, are always discrete and absolute because they identify a contradiction. (E.g. criticisms of a scientific theory.)

#5132​·​Tyler MillsOP, about 2 hours ago

Non-specific criticisms, those not taking into account the content of their target, are always "analogue" (or quantitative as opposed to qualitative) in the sense of being based on a variable whose quantity changes in a medium distinct from that hosting the knowledge it is serving as criticism for. (E.g. capital allocation in an economy; number of instances of a replicator.)

  Tyler Mills posted idea #5132.

Specific criticisms, those taking into account the content of their target, are always discrete and absolute because they identify a contradiction. (E.g. criticisms of a scientific theory.)

  Tyler Mills addressed criticism #5121.

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.

#5121​·​Benjamin Davies, 2 days ago

Why aren't mutations made to DNA a form of conjecture? I think of conjecture as being a pretty general term -- isn't all knowledge conjectural, ours or otherwise? Maybe semantics. Agreed that criticism is a subset of selection: selection that is a function of the knowledge in the target, perhaps? Whereas differential replication is how selection proceeds without referring to the specific knowledge in the target..? [Overall idea stands despite my concession above]

  Tyler Mills addressed criticism #5124.

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

#5124​·​Zakery Mizell revised 2 days ago

Maybe natural selection logically does not require death, but when we introduce a scarcity of resources, isn't death an inevitable byproduct? Eventually, the best replicating will be those which take the resources from others? If no death, then number of entities increases without bound. So any real system will have it, or will stop functioning when the limit is reached.

It's sort of like: the "this is replicating less" criticism has no actual weight to it unless there is a point beneath which any less fecundity = bye-bye.
**If things with arbitrarily low fecundity are left intact forever, how is differential replication a criticism?**

  Tyler Mills addressed criticism #5122.

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

#5122​·​Benjamin Davies, 2 days ago

No, my thinking here is that any given set of knowledge can only do inference: apply what transformations it has to whatever data it has, and that's it. It can't output things that are not already implicit in it, so cannot grow, in any epistemic sense. Even if running some kind of evolutionary procedure. An external source of novelty is required for growth, with respect to any given set of knowledge.

  Tyler Mills revised idea #5126.

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?

Unassailable argument for property rights?:
Does my body belong to anyone? Who? What about the knowledge in its brain, or the computations that it's carrying out? Or its sense of self? Ownership does not apply to these things? Anyone has as much of a claim to them as me? If not, and I do own these things, then ownership is indeed an unrefuted theory with respect to them. Then, why are these things a different case from other objects and processes, such as those in the room around me, and onward (per explanations, as the case may be)?

  Tyler Mills posted idea #5126.

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?

  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, 8 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, 5 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, 8 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, 2 days 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, 4 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, 4 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, 2 days 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 2 days 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, 4 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, 4 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 4 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, 4 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.