Erik Orrje
@erik-orrje·Member since September 2025
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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 differ, 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 konwledge could colonize the galaxy, it'd take much longer than with memes.
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.
#2355·Dennis Hackethal, 3 months agoMemes 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 differ, 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 konwledge could colonize the galaxy, it'd take much longer than with memes.
#2347·Dennis Hackethal, 3 months agoYeah 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.
Thanks for pointing out the misquotation
Memes and genes are the same type of knowledge. Since we can "let ideas die in their place", 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 correspondance, just more reach and adaptation across contexts.
Memes and genes are the same type of knowledge. Since we can "let our theories die in our place", 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 correspondance, just more reach and adaptation across contexts.
#2340·Dennis Hackethal, 3 months agoI 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.
Would you say there's correspondence for some knowledge in genes as well?
#2322·Benjamin Davies revised 3 months agoI 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 ideas die in their place", 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 correspondance, just more reach and adaptation across contexts.
Copypasted from your comment now in the revision. Please let me know if I'm doing things incorrectly.
Most people (except in Alzheimer's, etc.) don't run out of memory in the brain. If there's no scarcity for the space of ideas, why do they have to compete?
Most people (except in Alzheimer's, etc.) don't run out of memory in the brain. The reason most people don’t (permanently) run out memory (of either kind) isn’t that memory isn’t scarce, but that there’s a pruning mechanism in the mind. And there’s competition.
Thanks for clarifying! My criticism no longer applies.
Wait, I've probably misunderstood but in #2228 it seemed like you thought pruning was needed for scarcity, which is needed for competition between ideas and their evolution.
And you equated pruning with the meta algorithm.
And now you say the meta algorithm/pruning is not needed for the evolution of ideas?
Thanks for clarifying
Erik Orrje updated discussion ‘Is correspondance true (in CR)?’.
The title changed from ‘Is correspondance true (in CR)?’ to ‘Is correspondence true (in CR)?’.
The ‘About’ section changed as follows:
This thread is based on Lucas Smalldon's talk and article on correspondance: 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.
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.
CR is an evolutionary theory. There's no need for correspondence in Darwinism. Therefore, we don't need it in CR either.
This thread is based on Lucas Smalldon's talk and article on correspondance: 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.
#2278·Dirk Meulenbelt, 3 months agoYou say that trade-offs and scarcity are fundamental to biology. I agree, and this implies economics as a more fundamental science than biology or evolution. It still applies in our computer models, where biological details may not.
Guess: We can generalise economics further and let it be subsumed by epistemology.
When we choose to try to solve certain problems, we always make trade-offs from a place of scarcity. Likewise, our conjectures wouldn't evolve without the competition enabled by scarcity in our minds.
#2275·Dennis Hackethal, 3 months agoI don’t think the meta algorithm is necessary for the evolution of ideas. After all, there is no meta algorithm across minds, yet ideas (memes) evolve across minds. Inside a single mind, the meta algorithm is inherited from our non-creative ancestors, where (among other things) it acted as a fail safe against erroneous behaviors.
Wait, I've probably misunderstood but in #2228 it seemed like you thought pruning was needed for scarcity, which is needed for competition between ideas and their evolution.
And you equated pruning with the meta algorithm.
And now you say the meta algoritm/pruning is not needed for the evolution of ideas?
#2258·Edwin de Wit, 3 months agoI currently see Constructor Theory as a meta-theory. A different mode of explanation. But it raises an interesting question: does CT actually qualify as a deeper theory than the four strands? Even if we were to express all four strands in constructor-theoretic terms, that alone wouldn’t make it explain more or have greater reach. So when would it truly deserve to be considered a strand/theory of everything?
By the same logic, wouldn't neo-Darwinism also disqualify as a strand, since it's subsumed by Popperian epistemology?
#2256·Dirk Meulenbelt, 3 months agoMy point is rather that it's not so clean a line between explicit and inexplicit. You're a doctor, so imagine the steps being something like:
- Extensive description of patient's symptoms, test results, conclusion, etc, in English.
- Same as above but mostly made out of quick notes by attending doctors and nurses.
- Only a collection of test names and test results. Test results accompanied by Chinese.
- Just a collection of numbers coming out of tests, without saying which test.
Arguably all the information is always there, and can be read off, but with increasing difficulty, requiring you to learn another language, or do a series of deductions.
Yeah nice, seems true. There's no objective explicit/inexplicit ratio for knowledge, it depends on the person's background knowledge.
#2261·Edwin de Wit, 3 months agoI still see epistemology as distinct, and I'll try to make my case for it. Epistemology explains how humans create explanatory knowledge — unlike biological evolution, which also produces knowledge, but not explanations. Explanatory knowledge is special because it allows us to understand the world. Deutsch even suggests that this kind of knowledge tends toward convergence — a unified theory of everything — implying a deep connection between reality and its capacity to be explained.
Economics, on the other hand, isn’t distinct in the same way. It deals with trade-offs and scarcity — principles already fundamental to biology. Life itself is about managing limited resources and the trade-offs that come with them. Evolution, in turn, discovered increasingly effective strategies for doing so — including cooperation, exchange, and other relationships between and across lifeforms that facilitate these trades.
May have misunderstood, but do you mean that explanatory knowledge corresponds to truth, whereas biological/evolutionary knowledge doesn't?
I think that was refuted by Lucas Smalldon and others: https://barelymorethanatweet.com/
Hmm never thought of that, interesting! I think since the disease involves continuous loss of brain volume, harsware decay seems like the best explanation.
In general I think it makes sense to speak of diseases in neurology (e.g. Alzheimer's, Parkinsons, stroke) as bad hardware and psychiatric disease as bad software. But it could very well be that some of those diagnoses are miscategorised.
Hmm never thought of that, interesting! I think since the disease involves continuous loss of brain volume, hardware decay seems like the best explanation.
In general I think it makes sense to speak of diseases in neurology (e.g. Alzheimer's, Parkinsons, stroke) as bad hardware and psychiatric disease as bad software. But it could very well be that some of those diagnoses are miscategorised.
Most people (except in Alzheimer's, etc.) don't run out of memory in the brain. If there's no scarcity for the space of ideas, why do they have to compete?
Most people (except in Alzheimer's, etc.) don't run out of memory in the brain. If there's no scarcity for the space of ideas, why do they have to compete?
This should be marked as criticism, thanks!
Yeah that's definitely a possible medical condition, e.g. in psychosis or after having ECT. Don't think it's the best explanation for Alzheimer's though, where the loss of brain volume is so apparent.
Yeah that's definitely a possible medical condition, e.g. in psychosis or after having ECT. Don't think it's the best explanation for Alzheimer's though, where the loss of brain volume is so apparent.
#2263·Dennis Hackethal, 3 months agoWait, do you view the pruning as separate from the mere competition of ideas…?
Yes. When I say ‘pruning’, I’m referring to a specific mechanism of a meta algorithm in the mind. For more details, see my book A Window on Intelligence, I think chapter 5. There is no such meta algorithm in biological evolution.
Alright, I remember the meta algorithm from your book but can't recall if you adress this criticism: If there's no need for a meta algorithm in biological evolution, why must there be one for the evolution of ideas?
Adjustments from Dennis criticism: Not all competition is necessarily deleterious.
Wait, do you view the pruning as separate from the mere competition of ideas, or simply its hardware consequences? In Darwinian evolution, competition and pruning are the same phenomena. Would expect the same for the mind.
Wait, do you view the pruning as separate from the mere competition of ideas, or simply its hardware consequences?
#2238·Dirk Meulenbelt, 3 months agoLet's fuck with your intuitions a little bit:
Say "stop" when it's no longer an explanation:
Didactic chapter in plain English with examples and edge cases, distilled into a concise technical note with formal definitions, invariants, and pseudocode.
Literate program interleaving prose and code, or a heavily commented Python implementation with docstrings and tests.
The same code stripped of comments/tests and then minified or obfuscated (e.g., Python one‑liner, obfuscated C), up through esolangs and formalisms (Brainfuck, untyped lambda calculus with Church numerals, SKI combinators).
Operational specifications with minimal labels (Turing machine tables), then hand‑written assembly without labels and self‑modifying tricks, down to raw machine code bytes/hex and binary blobs with unknown ISA or entry point.
The same bits recast as DNA base mapping with unknown block codec, unknown compression, encrypted archives indistinguishable from noise, arbitrary bitstrings for unspecified UTMs, or physical media (flux/RF) without modulation specs.
Haha not a programmer so understood maybe half of it, but I think I see what you mean. There'll always be inexplicit parts to every explanation. My concept of explanations is that there must be at least some explicit part for it to be called an explanation. That's why genes aren't explanations.
#2241·Dirk Meulenbelt, 3 months agoNot a doctor. But it's not hard for me to imagine untainted memory but a script with an error such that it can't manage to look up the information.
Yeah that's definitely a possible medical condition, e.g. in psychosis or after having ECT. Don't think it's the best explanation for Alzheimer's though, where the loss of brain volume is so apparent.
#2247·Dennis Hackethal, 3 months agoThe pruning mechanism is part of it, but there’s more. Again, there’s also competition between ideas and even predatory behavior that can result in the elimination of ideas. All such phenomena taken together constitute natural selection in the mind.
Wait, do you view the pruning as separate from the mere competition of ideas, or simply its hardware consequences? In Darwinian evolution, competition and pruning are the same phenomena. Would expect the same for the mind.
#2230·Dennis Hackethal, 3 months agoSince you’re a doctor, Erik, let me ask: is there a possibility Alzheimer’s could be explained in terms of bad software? Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems like the prevailing view is limited to bad hardware.
Hmm never thought of that, interesting! I think since the disease involves continuous loss of brain volume, harsware decay seems like the best explanation.
In general I think it makes sense to speak of diseases in neurology (e.g. Alzheimer's, Parkinsons, stroke) as bad hardware and psychiatric disease as bad software. But it could very well be that some of those diagnoses are miscategorised.