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This is not a valid or interesting criticism of my argument that the apparent dilemma can be resolved through the growth of knowledge. 

Not interesting:
You’ve merely argued one side of the dilemma, apparently insisting that there is no dilemma to be resolved. If the dilemma can be resolved, then any argument for one side or the other is pedantic and superseded by that solution. 

Not valid:
Sex is neither necessary nor sufficient to cause pregnancy. “Eating too much” is also neither necessary nor sufficient to cause adiposity. Even if you assume that those voluntary actions played a causal role in the transformation, the argument you presented depends on the premise that “if someone voluntarily performs any action that contributes to the antecedents of a transformation and has knowledge about the antecedent relationship between those actions and that transformation, then that transformation is under their authority.” This is a deeply problematic theory, because it results in every accident or crime against someone happening “under their authority.” With respect to sex and pregnancy, specifically, this theory leads to the conclusion that miscarriages are also under one’s authority. Regardless of whether your real concern here is about the loss of life due to terminated pregnancies (vs. punishing women for having sex), far more potential lives are lost due to miscarriage than abortion, so this should be of much greater concern. 

Fortunately, miscarriages could also be avoided by using the technologies I proposed above. In the future, this could even become the preferred method of gestation for the protection of the child’s life, and the optimization of their early development.

At its core, I think evolution needs three variables: an environment, a mechanism for reproduction, and a mechanism for destruction. If either of these is missing, evolution will not happen. The algorithm for evolution is then definitively defined by the environment and the mechanisms of reproduction and destruction, with the current set of genes as the initial condition.

Could you say more about those regions? :)

I agree that creativity still could occur in total isolation, but I don't think they would generate much knowledge due to the lack of external feedback.

Even in isolation, the real world applies constraints/selection mechanisms. Mainly in the form of hardware constraints (scarcity of memory/working memory).

I imagine the mind sort of like the "primordial soup", where the first replicators began replicating. To simulate that, I don't think there's any room for a specific "selection algorithm".

It seems odd to me when people argue pregnancy is a loss of authority over one’s body.

A woman had sex. Assuming it was voluntary, what did she think was going to happen?

Imagine someone saying: ‘I ate too much. Now I’m fat. I’ve lost authority over my own body.’ But they didn’t. They got exactly what they should have expected.

I think what those people are really saying is: they don’t like that their actions have consequences. They want to have their cake and eat it, too.

Unless I'm mistaken, Deutsch has argued that a person in total isolation from reality would still be capable of creativity. Reality is a good source of problems/niches for us, but is not necessary. It seems to me we must have sources of selection in the mind. I picture autonomous regions, or layers, each of which is like an external reality from the perspective of the others, so they all scratch each other's backs.

One idea for a global criterion is simply productivity: If a program successfully produces an output which is then used by other programs (the more the "better"), it is replicated (by the global logic). Maybe it's replicated every time it's run as part of a greater process, in that sense. Sort of fits with capitalism: make useful products, get rewarded (replicated, here).
The bookkeeping may be an issue, though.

Do the compositions have to be self-reproducing? Or can they be replicated when a predefined global condition is met? I think we agree any predefined condition will keep the system closed-ended (the evolution of programs will be steered toward those meeting the condition). But maybe that's only if the condition is specific. If the criterion for replication to occur is non-specific, maybe this allows for open-endedness? It seems like we would want a condition that only rules out programs which cannot constitute a growth in knowledge.

Drawing on the framing of your question, it seems like a "universality of landscapes" is what's needed. Perhaps: the space of programs to be explored is only ever determined by whatever the system happens to have assembled so far, the pieces it has at any given time, which is never specified. What the system contains is determined by random/blind variation and composition (of some complete set of primitives) and selection for the most fecund compositions among them.

Hmm, I'll try to formulate in another way what I was getting at, not sure if you still disagree with this:

• My guess is that the selection mechanism can't be specified at all in the evolutionary algorithm, because every such specification is a restriction of universality. Reality has to do the selection.

Abortion is a technology problem, not a political issue. The choice between the loss of life and the loss of authority over one’s own body is a poor one. This dilemma is caused by a lack of medical knowledge.

At a high level, there are only two technologies needed to resolve this dilemma.
1. Safe extraction of a living pregnancy.
2. In Vitro Gestation.

In fact, if some of the political funding had been redirected toward research, it would probably be solved by now.

My suspicion remains that creativity and qualia come from some kind of blind exchange between layers of emergence, of which mutations and mistakes in copying, as seen in DNA, are an example.

That's what I get for suddenly returning to this discussion after a long gap. I was thinking that any computation can be recorded and re-run at will, in principle. So qualia can too. But indeed, I have suggested in this discussion that it is the evolution of programs that causes experience, and evolution cannot be scripted. This means a quale that is recorded will not "qualiate" if it is rerun exactly as recorded.

TL;DR: I don't.

That sounds right but how is it a criticism of my idea? It’s the ideas the mind evolves that change the landscape, no?

In biological evolution, the landscape itself never changes directly. It only happens as a consequence of evolving genes.

Guess: The same is true in the "landscape" of the mind: Individual ideas mutate and evolve in relation to problems, and that's what constitutes the landscape.

Another way to approach AGI? (Very early, preliminary thoughts.)

Say you write an evolutionary algorithm, like the ones that have been written before. Then DD would argue it’ll get stuck because all it can do is explore a given landscape for its best features. Whereas real evolution creates new landscapes.

To address this issue, you subject your algorithm itself to variation and selection, by wrapping it in another evolutionary algorithm. But this approach just kicks the can down the road because now it’s the space of programs that’s limited.

How do you break out of this limitation?

You can’t just keep wrapping your programs in evolutionary algorithms like that because that only keeps kicking the can down the road. It’s like adding more and more entries to a multiplication table. It’s not the same as a multiplication algorithm. But for evolution, the problem is harder, in a way, because not even recursion solves the issue, and the starting point wasn’t as ‘flat’ as a multiplication table. The starting point is already an algorithm, not just a list.

What’s needed, in DD’s lingo, is a jump to universality. But a jump to what kind of universality, exactly?

cc @tyler-mills

A quale can be recorded and replayed later, arbitrarily many times.

How do you know this?

A quale can be recorded and replayed later, arbitrarily many times. That looping program is not a person: it can only create whatever knowledge it originally did, not any possible knowledge, maybe until freed from the loop. Yet it still constitutes experience.
So people are not the only programs that can be qualia.

True that a person need not create new knowledge, but a looping quale is not a person, per #5035, so the claim survives this criticism.

True, knowledge could be created from each run of a quale, but a looping quale isn't a person, per #5035, so the claim in #5031 that not only people can undergo experience still stands.

Should clarify that personhood is: can create any new knowledge in principle (excluding resource constraints). A program consisting of a looping quale cannot create any possible knowledge, whether or not it is creating some each time it's run.

A looping quale is also not a person because personhood is not just: can create a given piece of new knowledge, it is: can create any knowledge (not just that created by this quale; again assuming knowledge creation defines qualia).

If qualia are only present when new knowledge is being made, then for a quale to be replayed it could be that there must be a reset each time: the knowledge produced from the previous run is erased. So w.r.t. the AGI system alone, new knowledge is being created each time (it doesn't matter if the knowledge is copied from a previous run and stored elsewhere, in which case it is not new w.r.t. that combined system).

Actually maybe this isn't so obvious. A person need not create new knowledge for the personhood property to be present, since it is a counterfactual property: a person can create new knowledge (new and non-inferable, I argue).

A quale can be recorded and replayed later, arbitrarily many times. That looping program is not a person (no knowledge is created, however many times it loops, for instance), but it still constitutes experience.
So people are not the only programs that can be qualia.

Some people are lactose intolerant, others are vegan.