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The capital a business receives from a buyer is feedback that is non-specific to the content of the product or the business which produced it. It's not knowledge bearing. It's a fungible, universal form of feedback, like energy -- and like the number of instances of a replicator..?

The appropriate term is range, not codomain. Correcting that and the redundancy per #5189: A program's reach is the intersection of its range and the solutions to current problems.

Fun question. Say the reach of a program is the set of all problems it can solve or help solve (whether anyone knows, or whether the problems exist yet). All of that program's possible outputs together comprise the implication space -- it sounds like "range" is the actual term. The instantiation of each item in the range is an occurrence of my "inferential novelty". The range is implicit in a program when it is created, but not all of that output will help solve problems. The program's reach is the subset that does.

I think all problems are known, so we can just say "solutions to problems."
A problem is a conflict between theories, meaning it relates to knowledge currently instantiated.

I'm on PC, and alt+shift+hyphen does not work—but alt+0151 on numpad does... which is a very Windows way to do it, but I'll take it.

But then there would need to be a preprogrammed dogmatic program at the bottom. (Or would there..?)

This framing seems good, sure. So what does "critical" really mean?
Does it mean: "Can change an existing thing"..? But that criticism program is dogmatic w.r.t. itself, isn't it? This is the whole question, here (or I'm confused), in your terms:
Can criticism, the variation of a dogmatic program, only happen at the hands of another dogmatic program? There's only "externally facing" criticism..? There are no critical programs? Only dogmatic ones criticizing other dogmatic ones.

I’ve been using Spotify for over a decade.

Every few months I try Apple Music only to run into bugs and switch back.

But this most recent switch is actually decent.

Transferring my favorited songs from Spotify finally worked.

AutoMix song transitions are fantastic.

Spatial Audio is a win.

Fingers crossed I won’t have a reason to return to Spotify this time.

Explanations are functions. In other words, explanations are software. There’s no sharp distinction between explanations and end products here. So the concern about tight coupling still applies.

@edwin-de-wit recently asked Deutsch about this:

… hard to vary can also be a property that you don’t want. Sometimes they say that complicated systems are just so entangled that they’re no longer changeable. You could call that hard to vary but it’s not a property you pursue.

Deutsch’s reply:

Quite so. So hard to vary is about explanations, not about end products. So the end product should be easy to vary, if you want to. But it should be hard to vary in the sense that you don’t want to.

So reach should only ever be invoked with respect to existing knowledge? So a program's reach is the intersection of its codomain and the solutions to known problems.

But this depends on what a "problem" is; any output will be the solution to some problem, somewhere, so all programs would have unlimited reach.

Maybe this definition accommodates both the multiversal and atemporal aspects of reality: a program's reach is the set of its outputs that solve problems in any universe (past, present or adjacent).

Fun question. Say the reach of a program is the set of all problems it can solve or help solve (whether anyone knows, or whether the problems exist yet). All of that program's possible outputs together comprise the implication space -- it sounds like "codomain" is actual term. The instantiation of each item in the codomain is an occurrence of my "inferential novelty". The codomain is implicit in a program when it is created, but not all of that output will help solve problems. The program's reach is the subset that does.

Taking Popper Too Far, Again: https://libertythroughreason.com/taking-popper-too-far-again/

Rationality as Computation: https://libertythroughreason.com/rationality-as-computation/

I think you may have misunderstood me. I asked how I can know that our discussion about HTV will be productive if we continue it now. (For context and for others: I’ve found that Liberty and I have roughly the same discussion in various venues every few months or so. I raised this issue in the linked X thread.)

I didn’t ask you to continue the object-level discussion itself.

Please address my concern before continuing the discussion.

I think we agree that the conjecturing and criticising of explanations is where the progress happens, and this choice you're saying people make at the end among conjectured theories is (relatively) mechanical. But I would also point out that trying to measure how HTV a theory is is as futile and scientistic as trying to measure moral worth. Yet it's still possible to have meaningful discussions about morality. I can't measure the moral value of murder but I can meaningfully argue it's worse than theft. So I think the claim that "if you can't program it you don't understand it" doesn't apply so universally as #3020 implies.

Would it help to distinguish between dogmatic vs. critical information processing?

That’s a distinction I’ve been using. All programs written to date are dogmatic. Whereas a genuine evolutionary algorithm would be critical, at least in part.

We don’t know how to write critical code. We only know how to write dogmatic code that looks critical.

Cosmic rays have been known to flip bits in computers, eg impacting election results: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2021arXiv210505103N/abstract

However, due to computational universality, we should be able to simulate a knowledge-growing system plus cosmic rays impacting that system.

So then at that point the source of the mutation is part of the program again…

How much overlap is there between the concept of inferential novelty and reach, if any?

Paul Raymond-Robichaud tells me (I think in this space) that in math, you can have a formalized notion of HTV. From what I recall he said, it sounded like that would be trivial to develop (for a mathematician like Paul – not for me).

Anyone who’s both mathematically and epistemologically inclined could give this a shot at generalization.

Space where Tyler, Charlie, and I discuss hard to vary: https://x.com/dchackethal/status/2083018149151084792

Maybe allowing deletion of exact duplicates with no parents is reasonable?

Too niche/specific for an extra feature tbh. If accidental duplicates happened often, then maybe.

I've been thinking of death as the loss of an instance of an idea from the soup. Part of what I'm curious about here is the epistemic difference between deaths of instances, and deaths of the whole lineage (which seems like a "refutation" in a different, more meaningful sense). See #5167.