Is correspondence true (in CR)?
This thread is based on Lucas Smalldon's talk and article on correspondence: https://barelymorethanatweet.com/. Later Dennis Hackethal followed up with criticism on X: https://x.com/dchackethal/status/1977089334294516124. This is my attempt to continue the discussion here on Veritula.
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With an account, you can revise, criticize, and comment on ideas, and submit new ideas.CR is an evolutionary theory. There's no need for correspondence in Darwinism. Therefore, we don't need it in CR either.
I think correspondence is to epistemology as adaptation is to evolution. Knowledge that corresponds more to reality tends to be more useful (and/or has more reach), similar to biological adaptation.
Memes and genes are the same type of knowledge. Since we can "let our theories die in our place", as Popper said, we can make faster iterations and expand the environment to which the idea is adapted (including potentially the whole universe). There's no need for correspondence, just more reach and adaptation across contexts.
Memes and genes are the same type of knowledge.
That doesn’t sound right to me. Can you elaborate?
They are the same knowledge in terms of encoding knowledge about the environment, and possible transformations based on that. That knowledge can differ in reach (context independence/how fundamental it is).
Their mode of replication differs, as each new guess in genes must be neutral or positive for the vehicle. This makes genes slower, but that's IMO a quantitative difference, not a qualitative one. Pure genetic knowledge could colonise the galaxy, it'd take much longer than with memes.
[E]ach new guess in genes must be neutral or positive for the vehicle.
I don’t think that’s true. I remember Deutsch saying something like this but I think he’s confused about evolution.
Not every genetic change that isn’t an improvement or neutral is automatically deleterious. A replicator could go through a series of changes that temporarily reduce its ability to spread through the population until it undergoes another change that raises that ability above the original level.
Their mode of replication differs, as each new guess in genes must be neutral or positive for the vehicle.
I think the word ‘as’ is strictly speaking false here. As in: even if it were true that each genetic change must be neutral or positive, that wouldn’t be the reason genes and memes have different modes of replication.
Assuming by ‘mode’ you mean ‘mechanism’, the difference is that genes don’t need to be expressed to be replicated whereas memes do. The reason for this difference is that one person has no direct visibility into other people’s brains to copy memes ‘wholesale’ – they can only make guesses based on the behavior they see. Whereas the enzymes involved in the replication of DNA do get to direct access to the entire DNA molecule.
Their mode of replication differs, as each new guess in genes must be neutral or positive for the vehicle. [Emphasis added.]
I share the gene’s-eye view advocated by Dawkins: changes are to be judged by how they affect the replicator’s ability to spread through the population, not by how they affect the individual organism (or “vehicle”, as you called it).
This difference matters because sometimes changes hurt an individual organism while increasing a replicator’s ability to spread. If a replicator that reduces its organism’s lifespan is better able to spread through the population at the expense of its rivals, then that’s what it will do.
Pure genetic knowledge could colonise the galaxy, it'd take much longer than with memes.
Deutsch disagrees. Quote:
The difference between biological evolution and human creative thought is that biological evolution is inherently limited in its range. That’s because biological evolution has no foresight. It can’t see a problem and conjecture a solution.
and quote:
The bombardier beetles squirt boiling water at their enemies. You can easily see that just squirting cold water at your enemies is not totally unhelpful. Then making it a bit hotter and a bit hotter. Squirting boiling water no doubt required many adaptations to make sure the beetle didn’t boil itself while it was making this boiling water. That happened because there was a sequence of steps in between, all of which were useful. But with campfires, it’s very hard to see how that could happen.
Humans have explanatory creativity. Once you have that, you can get to the moon. You can cause asteroids which are heading towards the earth to turn around and go away. Perhaps no other planet in the universe has that power, and it has it only because of the presence of explanatory creativity on it.
Sure it's hard to see. But I don't think it's impossible. For example, life could spread beyond the biosphere by asteroids, or aviating organisms slowly ascending upwards to eventually set off to space. Unlikely for sure, but again, why would it be impossible?
All of my criticisms notwithstanding, I actually agree with your conclusion that it may be possible in principle for life to spread into space. Like you, I see why that would be hard but not why it would be impossible.
(To anyone inclined to criticize this idea: consider criticizing #2366 instead so the criticism chain remains intact – unless there’s specifically something about my idea here as distinct from Erik’s that you want to criticize.)
Typo in discussion title: “correspondance” should be ‘correspondence’.
@erik-orrje You (and only you) can update the title here.
It sounds like the core disagreement is around Lucas’s idea that the concept of correspondence fragments the growth of knowledge: if correspondence is the aim of science but not of other fields, then that means the growth of knowledge works differently in science than in other fields.
I think Lucas is right to reject that fragmentation but I don’t think it happens in the first place.
CR universally describes the growth of knowledge as error correction. When such error correction leads to correspondence with the facts (about the physical world), we call that science. When it doesn’t, we call it something else, like art or engineering or skill-building.
It’s all still error correction. There is no fragmentation due to correspondence.
Yeah I could see some knowledge in genes corresponding to certain facts about reality, like knowledge about flight corresponding to facts about certain laws of physics.
Guess: All those "facts about reality" are just knowledge about regularities in the gene's environment. Some regularities are more context-independent than others, but we can't draw a firm line between parochial knowledge of its niche and knowledge corresponding to the facts.