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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".
Could you say more about those regions?
I wish! I'll try.
creativity still could occur in total isolation, but I don't think they would generate much knowledge due to the lack of external feedback.
Maybe less overall, maybe just less by our standards. Maybe still a lot of knowledge can be made in isolation, just of a schizophrenic kind, more unstable without the regularities of external reality. But I'm wondering if isolated regions of the mind can provide "external" variation to each other in that one can make changes to the other, but not vice versa (like how the world makes blind changes to DNA but not vice versa). Maybe this is how evolution happens more quickly in the mind than by random copying error and mutations alone, because there are many more sources of blind variation...
Even in isolation, the real world applies [hardware constraints]
Agreed. So by isolation from reality we shouldn't mean isolation from physics. Just that the evolution taking place in the mind has no specific causal dependence on the external reality, I think. If it's "isolated" in this sense, nothing outside the mind, if changed, would impact the mind's evolution, its content. Even though mind and world are both determined by the same physics. Reality is not necessary, in this sense, so marking this as a criticism.
I also picture a primordial soup often. Maybe including these autonomous regions or layers I'm grasping at. Soups and "Turing gases" have been programmed and so far always plateau in complexity, even with no predefined criterion, so there's something else going on.
One neat paper, for example: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2406.19108
It sounded unbounded at first, but Claude explains that in a recent followup interview, plateauing has been confirmed: https://poggio-lab.mit.edu/blogsupdates/interview-blaise-aguera-y-arcas
I also picture a primordial soup often. Maybe including these autonomous regions or layers I'm grasping at. Soups and "Turing gases" have been programmed and so far always plateau in complexity, even with no predefined criterion, so there's something else going on.
Couldn't it be that there still are limitations of the simulated environment that act as selection criteria? Such as the available memory. The "soup" definitely seems more open to the entire world, which presumably would allow for more open ended evolution (even though that still took a couple of billion years after universality was achieved).
But the mind has finite memory as well, and doesn't stop showing novelty. I was going to say it doesn't plateau in complexity, but actually I guess there is a ceiling... It's just that new and better ideas make better use of the finite resources; they aren't just more complex.
Not sure what you mean by the soup being more open to the world, or allowing for "more" open-ended evolution. Unless you mean the quantity. I think evolution is either open- or closed-ended, as a binary. And again, not convinced any external world or feedback is required for open-endedness (per Deutsch). It might merely be very helpful.
And again, not convinced any external world or feedback is required for open-endedness (per Deutsch). It might merely be very helpful.
Yes, and perhaps this helpfulness is underestimated? One guess is therefore that the plateaus that have occurred is due to the difficulty of escaping the hardware case of the computer. Our vehicles (bodies) allow for much easier physical instantiation of replicators, compared to replicators inside computers.