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With an account, you can revise, criticize, and comment on ideas.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
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.
That sounds right but how is it a criticism of my idea? It’s the ideas the mind evolves that change the landscape, no?
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.
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.
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".