Misc. Conjectures Re: AGI and Evolution
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With an account, you can revise, criticize, and comment on ideas.Knowledge growth (such as in genes in the biosphere, or in a person) can only proceed by conjecture and criticism -- variation and selection. In a system which can create knowledge, but has not yet, there are no modes of substantive criticism available, since that would itself require knowledge. So how can the system create knowledge at all? Because although substantive criticism is not yet possible, the crudest form of full-on refutation is: the destruction of the information medium on which a conjecture is based, i.e., death. Death is the only "undesigned" refutation. So any initial knowledge created in an otherwise empty knowledge-creating system can only be that relating to how to avoid death in the local environment. This is the knowledge which defines replicators.
Natural selection requires differential replication, not death. (Death is just an extreme form of differential replication, when compared to any allele that does replicate.)
Maybe natural selection logically does not require death, but when we introduce a scarcity of resources, isn't death an inevitable byproduct? Eventually, the best replicating will be those which take the resources from others? If no death, then number of entities increases without bound. So any real system will have it, or will stop functioning when the limit is reached.
It's sort of like: the "this is replicating less" criticism has no actual weight to it unless there is a point beneath which any less fecundity = bye-bye.
**If things with arbitrarily low fecundity are left intact forever, how is differential replication a criticism?**
The term "death" is being used too vaguely. (Or else I am misunderstanding.) Do you think that a gene replicating and then dying (while its offspring survives) is "death?" A "refutation?"
Or do you mean "total elimination of the allele" as "death" or "refutation?"