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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).

Great, that makes sense. True statements should ofc be criticisable depending on the problem situation.

Like, the criticism flag isn’t just for factual errors, if that’s what you mean.

If you think his comment won’t work as a solution for AGI, then his comment is erroneous from that POV.

Do you think my comment shouldn't count as a criticism? The content of Martin's comment doesn't contain any errors, but it can be criticised as an attempt to solve problems towards AGI

May have found a solution to my salt problem: https://www.instagram.com/p/DZ5cCwQFOtp/

The Kirin Electric Salt Spoon. CNET wrote an article about it: https://www.cnet.com/home/kitchen-and-household/we-tested-an-electric-salt-spoon-that-might-help-you-stick-to-your-low-sodium-diet/

It basically works by using electric signals to trick your brain into thinking it’s tasting salt.

If this is intended to answer my criticism, shouldn’t it be marked as a counter-criticism?

“definitively defined” sounds tautological.

You’ve submitted several criticisms in one idea. It’s in your interest to avoid doing that because you make yourself vulnerable to what we call ‘bulk criticism’. See #4471.

I may have more criticisms but I can’t really submit them productively until you split up your idea.

Please work on your tone. You’re mixing in personal accusations rather than just sticking with impersonal arguments. For example: “apparently insisting”, “pedantic”, and also a hidden accusation that I have an ulterior motive to punish women rather than save lives (“Regardless of whether your real concern here…”).

This kind of tone can derail and sabotage debate. Veritula has a policy against any behavior that sabotages debate. Please review our forum rules (#4460).

New accounts, especially anonymous ones, need to tread lightly and prove they’re worth engaging with.

This is not a valid or interesting criticism of my argument that the apparent dilemma can be resolved through the growth of knowledge.

It wasn’t intended as a criticism. It was a related observation. That’s why I didn’t mark my idea as a criticism. It sounds like you’ve misunderstood me.

Please remember to mark your ideas as criticisms whenever appropriate. Although this idea is phrased as a question, it’s still a pending criticism as long as it doesn’t get answered.

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".

It seems odd to me when people argue pregnancy is a loss of authority over one’s body.

A woman had sex. Assuming it was voluntary, what did she think was going to happen?

Imagine someone saying: ‘I ate too much. Now I’m fat. I’ve lost authority over my own body.’ But they didn’t. They got exactly what they should have expected.

I think what those people are really saying is: they don’t like that their actions have consequences. They want to have their cake and eat it, too.

One idea for a global criterion is simply productivity: If a program successfully produces an output which is then used by other programs (the more the "better"), it is replicated (by the global logic). Maybe it's replicated every time it's run as part of a greater process, in that sense. Sort of fits with capitalism: make useful products, get rewarded (replicated, here).
The bookkeeping may be an issue, though.

Do the compositions have to be self-reproducing? Or can they be replicated when a predefined global condition is met? I think we agree any predefined condition will keep the system closed-ended (the evolution of programs will be steered toward those meeting the condition). But maybe that's only if the condition is specific. If the criterion for replication to occur is non-specific, maybe this allows for open-endedness? It seems like we would want a condition that only rules out programs which cannot constitute a growth in knowledge.

Drawing on the framing of your question, it seems like a "universality of landscapes" is what's needed. Perhaps: the space of programs to be explored is only ever determined by whatever the system happens to have assembled so far, the pieces it has at any given time, which is never specified. What the system contains is determined by random/blind variation and composition (of some complete set of primitives) and selection for the most fecund compositions among them.

Abortion is a technology problem, not a political issue. The choice between the loss of life and the loss of authority over one’s own body is a poor one. This dilemma is caused by a lack of medical knowledge.

At a high level, there are only two technologies needed to resolve this dilemma.
1. Safe extraction of a living pregnancy.
2. In Vitro Gestation.

In fact, if some of the political funding had been redirected toward research, it would probably be solved by now.

My suspicion remains that creativity and qualia come from some kind of blind exchange between layers of emergence, of which mutations and mistakes in copying, as seen in DNA, are an example.

That's what I get for suddenly returning to this discussion after a long gap. I was thinking that any computation can be recorded and re-run at will, in principle. So qualia can too. But indeed, I have suggested in this discussion that it is the evolution of programs that causes experience, and evolution cannot be scripted. This means a quale that is recorded will not "qualiate" if it is rerun exactly as recorded.

TL;DR: I don't.

That sounds right but how is it a criticism of my idea? It’s the ideas the mind evolves that change the landscape, no?

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

A quale can be recorded and replayed later, arbitrarily many times.

How do you know this?

True that a person need not create new knowledge, but a looping quale is not a person, per #5035, so the claim survives this criticism.

True, knowledge could be created from each run of a quale, but a looping quale isn't a person, per #5035, so the claim in #5031 that not only people can undergo experience still stands.