Is Self-Replication Required for the Growth of Knowledge?
Either in biological evolution, or the evolution of ideas (programs) in a mind, is a mechanism for self-replication required for knowledge to grow? That is, do entities within the system need to be able to recreate themselves, or cause themselves to be recreated, for there to be progress? Why?
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With an account, you can revise, criticize, and comment on ideas, and submit new ideas.What is the distinction between replication and self-replication?
The distinction is where the knowledge for performing the replication is physically located.
Replication is: an entity in an environment being recreated or copied because of the environment (which can include the entity, as in the case of self-replication). The general case.
Self-replication is the special case of replication where: an entity is replicated as caused by aspects of itself alone. The knowledge for its replication is within it.
How many times need something be replicated before the term 'replicator' should apply? If it's a matter of reliability, what defines reliable? Is "replicator-ness" on a continuum?
You could think up a design for a self-replicating machine and then build it. Assuming you made no critical mistakes, you have made a self-replicator that hasn’t self-replicated yet.
It is considered a replicator based on what it can do, rather than on what it has done.
My neo-Darwinian approach to the mind suggests that minds evolve knowledge through the imperfect replication of ideas.
Some people (most notably Ella Hoeppner) have argued that replication isn’t necessary for evolution to take place. All you need is variation and selection.
My response has always been that I don’t care whether replication is a necessary component of evolution, but that, 1), in the Popperian spirit, we shouldn’t break with other evolutionary theories unnecessarily. Genes and memes both replicate.
2) We can explain more if we use replicators. For example, memory and the origin of creativity just ‘fall out’ of the neo-Darwinian approach. Ideas in a single mind may have static vs dynamic replication strategies. All of that is lost without the notion of replication.
3) From what I’ve seen, the attempt to remove replication from evolution doesn’t actually remove it.
If you take some string of information and vary it, then by definition, only parts of it become different. Other parts are preserved. Even if you vary the string several times, the parts that didn’t change were still instantiated at each stage. So they still replicated. (As I recall, this is how Richard Dawkins defines what a gene is, in his book The Selfish Gene.)
Also, just by thinking about the string of information and how to vary it, you’ve already replicated the information. It now exists in its original medium and in your mind.
As I wrote in #4051, it doesn’t matter to me whether replication is necessary for evolution to take place. I’m open to the idea that it isn’t. But what I’d like instead is some argument why it couldn’t figure in the evolution that happens in the mind.