Search Ideas

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..?)

I’ve been using Spotify for over a decade.

Every few months I try Apple Music only to run into bugs and switch back.

But this most recent switch is actually decent.

Transferring my favorited songs from Spotify finally worked.

AutoMix song transitions are fantastic.

Spatial Audio is a win.

Fingers crossed I won’t have a reason to return to Spotify this time.

Explanations are functions. In other words, explanations are software. There’s no sharp distinction between explanations and end products here. So the concern about tight coupling still applies.

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.

Taking Popper Too Far, Again: https://libertythroughreason.com/taking-popper-too-far-again/

Rationality as Computation: https://libertythroughreason.com/rationality-as-computation/

I think you may have misunderstood me. I asked how I can know that our discussion about HTV will be productive if we continue it now. (For context and for others: I’ve found that Liberty and I have roughly the same discussion in various venues every few months or so. I raised this issue in the linked X thread.)

I didn’t ask you to continue the object-level discussion itself.

Please address my concern before continuing the discussion.

Would it help to distinguish between dogmatic vs. critical information processing?

That’s a distinction I’ve been using. All programs written to date are dogmatic. Whereas a genuine evolutionary algorithm would be critical, at least in part.

We don’t know how to write critical code. We only know how to write dogmatic code that looks critical.

Cosmic rays have been known to flip bits in computers, eg impacting election results: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2021arXiv210505103N/abstract

However, due to computational universality, we should be able to simulate a knowledge-growing system plus cosmic rays impacting that system.

So then at that point the source of the mutation is part of the program again…

How much overlap is there between the concept of inferential novelty and reach, if any?

Paul Raymond-Robichaud tells me (I think in this space) that in math, you can have a formalized notion of HTV. From what I recall he said, it sounded like that would be trivial to develop (for a mathematician like Paul – not for me).

Anyone who’s both mathematically and epistemologically inclined could give this a shot at generalization.

Space where Tyler, Charlie, and I discuss hard to vary: https://x.com/dchackethal/status/2083018149151084792

Maybe allowing deletion of exact duplicates with no parents is reasonable?

Too niche/specific for an extra feature tbh. If accidental duplicates happened often, then maybe.

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.