Misc. Conjectures Re: AGI and Evolution
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With an account, you can revise, criticize, and comment on ideas.Conversely, non-inferential novelty does not follow by any inference or deduction; it is not implicit in existing knowledge, so it is not in any set of knowledge's implication space (except that of the laws of physics...).
Knowledge which is novel in this way is what constitutes creation in the sense we mean in epistemology. The two known examples of non-inferential knowledge growth are biological evolution and some of the thinking which takes place in the minds of people (human or AGI).
Any given set of knowledge cannot grow itself non-inferentially. There must be a source of novelty, of variation, that is epistemically external to it.
If we take that claim as general, then the mutation of DNA constituting the creation/novelty/knowledge-growth in biology is a specific instance: cosmic ray strikes and errors in copying due to chemistry are sources of variation not caused by the DNA’s knowledge).
The externally-derived sources of variation/novelty in the case of DNA (cosmic rays and failures in copying due to chemistry) are blind: they do not interact (epistemically) with the knowledge of the system. That is, their changes are independent of the knowledge in the system. This is what makes these sources epistemically separate.
For the changes made by a source of variation to be dependent on the content of any knowledge in the target, the source would have to contain knowledge itself. (The DNA mutation sources do not.) Blind changes are dependent on the medium in which information is contained, like an A versus a G in a strand of DNA (assuming these are information media). But the change made to the A or G by the cosmic ray is independent of the information they are hosting, if any. Any changes by the ray are dependent on the physical/chemical structure of the target, the substrate. Information is substrate independent. It is not the information stored in the A or G that is determining what changes are made to them.
That these external sources of variation in the case of DNA do not themselves contain knowledge is happenstance, another special case. A source of variation acting on a given set of knowledge can be knowledge-bearing while still being epistemically external to the target (making only blind changes to it), so long as the variations do not depend on the specific content of the knowledge in the target. So: set A is altered by set B, each are knowledge-containing, but knowledge in B does not pertain to A.
If changes are not blind, the changer is changing based on the content of the knowledge in the target, in which case the two have a joint implication space: their possible states are all implicit in the system, and there are no states that are novel with respect to either of them; creativity is not possible. It’s like two differently charged conductors coming into contact and neutralizing the electric field between them. An "epistemic capacitor."
But if the source of variation only makes changes that are blind–that do not depend on the specific content of the target–then its implication space remains separate from the target’s. It is changing the target's implication space (its set of counterfactuals...), serving as a source of novelty for the target, while its own implication space is unchanged.
Creativity (or “creation” or non-inferential novelty) is occurring in a system iff the system is being altered by a second system that is epistemically separated from it (its changes are nonspecific to the information content of the first system).
Conjecture: a source of variation with its own knowledge can remain blind and external to its target while nonetheless receiving feedback from the target, so long as the feedback is non-specific to any content in the target.
An example of this is prices in a market: a price communicates information about (or caused by) knowledge in a system while being agnostic to the content; the specifics and interactions of the target knowledge are abstracted away, so any changes made by sources receiving the price information remain blind to the target, and therefore can remain a source of novelty to them (the prices themselves are not a source of novelty; they are a means of retaining a causal relationship while preventing the “collapse” of two epistemic systems into one)...
Any relation in all this to entanglement and decoherence? In the picture laid out here, the non-specificity of feedback seems to be preventing decoherence of a sort...