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Time-release melatonin also does not noticeably affect the larger issue for me of falling asleep.

Standard melatonin backfires, causing me (and at least one other person I know) to wake up at around hour 5 after falling asleep (maybe when it has finished metabolizing). This is bad, especially if it means you cannot fall back asleep (as in my case, more than half the time).

I am sometimes physically tired by hour 16 of the day, but I can easily stay up and continue working to hour 18 or 20. I have no caffeine or nighttime sugar.

Falling asleep has been a lifelong challenge for me. I suspect there is a "preference fight" going on, among other things, keeping my thoughts highly active.

The capital a business receives from a buyer is feedback that is non-specific to the content of the product or the business which produced it. It's not knowledge bearing. It's a fungible, universal form of feedback, like energy -- and like the number of instances of a replicator..?

The appropriate term is range, not codomain. Correcting that and the redundancy per #5189: A program's reach is the intersection of its range and the solutions to current problems.

Fun question. Say the reach of a program is the set of all problems it can solve or help solve (whether anyone knows, or whether the problems exist yet). All of that program's possible outputs together comprise the implication space -- it sounds like "range" is the actual term. The instantiation of each item in the range is an occurrence of my "inferential novelty". The range is implicit in a program when it is created, but not all of that output will help solve problems. The program's reach is the subset that does.

I think all problems are known, so we can just say "solutions to problems."
A problem is a conflict between theories, meaning it relates to knowledge currently instantiated.

I'm on PC, and alt+shift+hyphen does not work—but alt+0151 on numpad does... which is a very Windows way to do it, but I'll take it.

But then there would need to be a preprogrammed dogmatic program at the bottom. (Or would there..?)

But this depends on what a "problem" is; any output will be the solution to some problem, somewhere, so all programs would have unlimited reach.

I've been thinking of death as the loss of an instance of an idea from the soup. Part of what I'm curious about here is the epistemic difference between deaths of instances, and deaths of the whole lineage (which seems like a "refutation" in a different, more meaningful sense). See #5167.

By "weight" I meant that there being fewer instances of an idea (or less causal power, as you propose), doesn't actually criticize anything (content-wise), until the idea drops to zero (at which point, that idea is gone, and the knowledge content in the system has meaningfully changed -- epistemically changed...). Extinction (death of all instances -- and alleles..?) does seem like a refutation of the idea/gene.

This is the same as in an economy, seems to me. Maybe part of what can be clarified in this discussion will be these different modes of criticism. Please see #5133 and related.

Does not happen? With unlimited resources, why can't it? Competition will not always prevent it, will it?

But couldn't scarcity of resources be part of the underlying mechanism? We wouldn't want to say, "assume no speed limit to mass, because we want the underlying necessity of the mechanism of gravity." But the scarcity of speed is integral to the mechanism.

no scarcity for idea resources

"Idea resources" are computational resources, which are always scarce. Even with universality (modulo resources), the limits of the resources must have some effects on the evolution, I would think. Some developmental paths cannot be taken.

But sometimes revisions can be substantive, and OP could defend against one version, and in that case it should count toward the battle-tested badge!

Deleting posts can really mess up the continuity of discussions, and allow for dishonesty.

My profile shows my revision to #5126 under Wall and under Activity, but not the post itself under the Wall. The revision is a jumble of red and green highlighted text (in this case, because the revision was significant), hard to read. Wall should only show latest versions of posts, not edits to them. Edits should go under Activity. And/or have the previous post versions viewable with the little arrows, as usual (and as done in the idea-focused view, after you click on the idea itself). Always show latest versions of ideas on the Wall so it's clear and easy to read.

The change in population of a replicator is non-specific to its content?

The capital allocated to a business is non-specific to its content? Conflating with the prices of a good?

But the extinction of a replicator by destroying its last instance does seem absolute, unlike the change in its population, which I suggest is non-specific to the content in #5133.

Yes, the quantity variable is instantiated in the collective physical substrate comprising all of the replicator instances.

None of the replicators have that information. If that quantity variable exists, it's instantiated somewhere else.

Why aren't mutations made to DNA a form of conjecture? I think of conjecture as being a pretty general term -- isn't all knowledge conjectural, ours or otherwise? Maybe semantics. Agreed that criticism is a subset of selection: selection that is a function of the knowledge in the target, perhaps? Whereas differential replication is how selection proceeds without referring to the specific knowledge in the target..? [Overall idea stands despite my concession above]

No, my thinking here is that any given set of knowledge can only do inference: apply what transformations it has to whatever data it has, and that's it. It can't output things that are not already implicit in it, so cannot grow, in any epistemic sense. Even if running some kind of evolutionary procedure. An external source of novelty is required for growth, with respect to any given set of knowledge.