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No, it will or it won't, but "probably" expresses one's awareness of a lack of battletested explanations, or of their own uncertainty or lack of confidence in the prediction, etc. (cf. #4764).

Creativity isn't defined by its outputs but by its process. RNGs do not recognise or criticise ideas.

You're right and I revised my criticism.

Doesn't it? All explanatory knowledge is in the set of all possible programs, and a random program (or number) generator can generate any of those, given infinite time.

But an AI programmed to make random variations to its conjectures (English or otherwise) can only do so by choosing from an existing set of variations. Again, that knowledge is pre-existing. True evolution must involve variations to the substrate on which the knowledge is based; variations must be agnostic to the semantics of whatever they are acting upon, else they are already implicit from it, in which case their application does not constitute a truly novel conjecture (in the sense defining creativity).

Whatever new "explanations" it creates are derivable from (and by?) the knowledge in the training data. It isn't evolution if all of the variations and selection criteria are stored ahead of time. That's just a search process, as in the case of Move 37 per AlphaGo.

The definition of fitness for DNA also originated outside it, so this doesn't in itself suggest the system isn't actually creating new knowledge.

A person could create the same knowledge that biological evolution does, if only by simulating it. But it could still be true that only people can create explanatory knowledge. (That they can create all possible explanatory knowledge is Deutsch's criterion for personhood.)

"No unconscious creativity" seems the simpler option. But here we arrive again at biological evolution, which is unconscious, yet is creating knowledge. Does this serve as a distinction between explanatory knowledge and non? Explanatory knowledge can only be created by a conscious process?

Either there is no unconscious creativity, or only evolutionary/creative epochs with certain properties are conscious. The most obvious candidate for the property is complexity (in the sense of sophistication): only programs (existing knowledge) of a certain sophistication, once subjected to the evolutionary process, necessitates consciousness. Complex problem solving seems to require consciousness. Meanwhile, we do not seem to be conscious of "simpler" creative tasks, like... Like what? What is a "simple" creative task? What is an example of a creative task we perform unconsciously? How could we determine it was an act of creation (new knowledge), and not an act of deductive inference of the kind characterizing AI?

This suggests that all experience is determined by what programs are being subjected to evolution at any given time, the niches that are being adapted to. But why is not all creativity in the mind conscious? (All consciousness might necessarily be creativity).

But if the evolution is the defining feature of personhood, and the evolution is non-computational, then the personhood is non-computational. And consciousness would then not be a software property.

Programs could be evolved non-computationally. But that process could itself still be simulated, per the Church-Turing-Deutsch Thesis.

By the Church-Turing Thesis, all computation can be specified/programmed. So the evolutionary aspect of a person can be specified/programmed, if it is computational.

The system may not have perfect knowledge of all programs present in it. The repeated independent emergence of winged flight in the biosphere comes to mind.

Because programs present in the system at one time could be no longer present at another time. Previously well-adapted programs could have decayed, been destroyed or consumed. So the same evolutionary path (approximately or not) could be travelled again, in principle.

Actually this is not implied. One experience and an identical later one could be caused by the same program(s) being run again at a later time; if the program which is identical to the given experience is part of an "evolutionary personhood program", that still qualifies: If the second experience is identical, under the above solution that just means that the exact same evolutionary steps are taken in the second case. Maybe this would virtually never happen, but poses no problem of principle.

Understanding explanatory knowledge seems like a better criterion

By the latter standard, neither nature nor random number generators are people, which is sensible; nor can nature create any given possible knowledge tractably -- this is true because the fact that all possible knowledge exists is only by way of the multiverse, which is a process that cannot be simulated in its entirety, even by a quantum computer.

This is a bad criterion because then random program generators are sometimes people.

The other day, I heard an American say ‘must not’ in the sense you mean. So this seems to be more common than I realized.

He didn’t use the contraction, and I suspect Americans would find the contraction unnatural. But they do apparently agree that ‘must not’ does not only mean ‘is forbidden to’ but also ‘necessarily cannot’. So I was definitely wrong about this.

Some people think if they’re hungry that means they’re losing fat. I think that’s wrong.

You can eat a single meal at Cheesecake Factory for 2500kcals and be hungry again an hour later.

Or you can eat low-calorie foods throughout the day and not get very hungry until it’s actually time to eat again.

Some people might have trouble reaching their maintenance calories if they ate nothing but chicken breast, boiled potatoes, and broccoli for a day. They’d feel very full throughout the day.

I don’t expect much correlation, if any, between how satiating and how calorically dense some food is.

The good news for people who enjoy volume eating is that you can eat a lot while losing fat as long as you do it right. That means foods high in fiber and/or water (again, potatoes) and lean proteins. Vegetables generally work well.

The most important thing for fat loss is a calorie deficit, not hunger. Hunger is not a reliable indicator that you’re losing fat. You could be losing fat without being hungry, or you could be gaining weight while being hungry often.

Don’t go off of feelings. Count calories, macronutrients, and fiber, and weigh yourself to track progress.

In everyday English, we say ‘probably’ to leave room for error and communicate some uncertainty. That’s fine because everyone knows we’re not assigning actual probabilities in the sense of the probability calculus.

In math, we use the probability calculus to describe the frequency of outcomes for underlying processes that look random. Like a coin toss. That’s also fine because we know all possible outcomes and we have a measure for each.

Things go wrong when people use probability even though they don’t know the outcomes (because of the growth of knowledge, say, as you write in #4762) or they have no measure for them or the underlying phenomena don’t behave randomly (again because of the growth of knowledge). Like Elon Musk tweeting we’re 90% likely to see AGI in 2026. (Not a literal quote but he says stuff like that sometimes.)

Some people try to steal the prestige of math and hide their ignorance by using the probability calculus illegitimately.

See also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfzSE4Hoxbc. It’s been years since I watched it but it’s bound to have related ideas.

(Steel-manning the common sense view)

We assign implicit probabilities as an expression of our current state of knowledge.

"In the summer desert it will probably be sunny this afternoon" tends to come from some who has no reason to think it won't be sunny, but maybe hasn't investigated it enough to be confident. It roughly translates to "everything I know points to it being sunny this afternoon, but I don't have a grasp of all the factors involved, so I am allowing myself the slim possibility (lol) that I will be surprised".

It is mistaken to apply probabilistic thinking to human affairs, because they involve knowledge, and the growth of knowledge cannot be predicted.