Misc. Conjectures Re: AGI and Evolution

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Claim: It is useful (if not crucial) to distinguish between two notions of novelty: inferential and non-inferential.

Knowledge that is inferentially novel may never have been seen before, but was already implicit in existing knowledge; it results from application and composition of existing knowledge (e.g. the running of programs). What is novel in this way can be instantiated without any external epistemic (knowledge-related) influence. A program needs infrastructure to allow its computation to occur; it does not need another program, in an epistemic sense: If there's a dependency, we should consider the two to be part of the same "epistemic system." Let's say the dependent target has no "implication space" until its needed source is causally linked to it. The source may have its own implication space. Once "joined," a new implication space is defined.

Inferentially novel output (the instantiation of knowledge in an implication space) is all that current computer software (and all AI) is capable of. These systems "create" knowledge only in this sense.