Search Ideas

Unassailable argument for property rights?:
Does my body belong to anyone? Who? What about the knowledge in its brain, or the computations that it's carrying out? Or its sense of self? Ownership does not apply to these things? Anyone has as much of a claim to them as me? If not, and I do own these things, then ownership is indeed an unrefuted theory with respect to them. Then, why are these things a different case from other objects and processes, such as those in the room around me, and onward (per explanations, as the case may be)?

Any relation in all this to entanglement and decoherence? In the picture laid out here, the non-specificity of feedback seems to be preventing decoherence of a sort...

I.e., information caused (if only partially) by some source can be "content independent" w.r.t. that source in a similar sense to how information itself is substrate independent.

An example of this is prices in a market: a price communicates information about (or caused by) knowledge in a system while being agnostic to the content; the specifics and interactions of the target knowledge are abstracted away, so any changes made by sources receiving the price information remain blind to the target, and therefore can remain a source of novelty to them (the prices themselves are not a source of novelty; they are a means of retaining a causal relationship while preventing the “collapse” of two epistemic systems into one)...

Conjecture: a source of variation with its own knowledge can remain blind and external to its target while nonetheless receiving feedback from the target, so long as the feedback is non-specific to any content in the target.

Creativity (or “creation” or non-inferential novelty) is occurring in a system iff the system is being altered by a second system that is epistemically separated from it (its changes are nonspecific to the information content of the first system).

But if the source of variation only makes changes that are blind–that do not depend on the specific content of the target–then its implication space remains separate from the target’s. It is changing the target's implication space (its set of counterfactuals...), serving as a source of novelty for the target, while its own implication space is unchanged.

If changes are not blind, the changer is changing based on the content of the knowledge in the target, in which case the two have a joint implication space: their possible states are all implicit in the system, and there are no states that are novel with respect to either of them; creativity is not possible. It’s like two differently charged conductors coming into contact and neutralizing the electric field between them. An "epistemic capacitor."

That these external sources of variation in the case of DNA do not themselves contain knowledge is happenstance, another special case. A source of variation acting on a given set of knowledge can be knowledge-bearing while still being epistemically external to the target (making only blind changes to it), so long as the variations do not depend on the specific content of the knowledge in the target. So: set A is altered by set B, each are knowledge-containing, but knowledge in B does not pertain to A.

For the changes made by a source of variation to be dependent on the content of any knowledge in the target, the source would have to contain knowledge itself. (The DNA mutation sources do not.) Blind changes are dependent on the medium in which information is contained, like an A versus a G in a strand of DNA (assuming these are information media). But the change made to the A or G by the cosmic ray is independent of the information they are hosting, if any. Any changes by the ray are dependent on the physical/chemical structure of the target, the substrate. Information is substrate independent. It is not the information stored in the A or G that is determining what changes are made to them.

The externally-derived sources of variation/novelty in the case of DNA (cosmic rays and failures in copying due to chemistry) are blind: they do not interact (epistemically) with the knowledge of the system. That is, their changes are independent of the knowledge in the system. This is what makes these sources epistemically separate.

Conversely, non-inferential novelty does not follow by any inference or deduction; it is not implicit in existing knowledge, so it is not in any set of knowledge's implication space (except that of the laws of physics...).

Knowledge which is novel in this way is what constitutes creation in the sense we mean in epistemology. The two known examples of non-inferential knowledge growth are biological evolution and some of the thinking which takes place in the minds of people (human or AGI).

Any given set of knowledge cannot grow itself non-inferentially. There must be a source of novelty, of variation, that is epistemically external to it.
If we take that claim as general, then the mutation of DNA constituting the creation/novelty/knowledge-growth in biology is a specific instance: cosmic ray strikes and errors in copying due to chemistry are sources of variation not caused by the DNA’s knowledge).

Claim: It is useful (if not crucial) to distinguish between two notions of novelty: inferential and non-inferential.

Knowledge that is inferentially novel may never have been seen before, but was already implicit in existing knowledge; it results from application and composition of existing knowledge (e.g. the running of programs). What is novel in this way can be instantiated without any external epistemic (knowledge-related) influence. A program needs infrastructure to allow its computation to occur; it does not need another program, in an epistemic sense: If there's a dependency, we should consider the two to be part of the same "epistemic system." Let's say the dependent target has no "implication space" until its needed source is causally linked to it. The source may have its own implication space. Once "joined," a new implication space is defined.

Inferentially novel output (the instantiation of knowledge in an implication space) is all that current computer software (and all AI) is capable of. These systems "create" knowledge only in this sense.

I wonder if there is any significance to the "distance" the laws of physics are from us, in the sense of emergence. Each quantum application of the laws of physics (conceived as discrete steps) is so far down, but maybe it need not be so. Maybe there are people in other laws of physics, where the laws are much closer at hand. Do the laws need to have a certain minimum range of emergence for personhood to be possible..? Couldn't people like us exist in a universe where fundamental physics is no more complex than the operation of our minds, or is the "breathing room" we have here necessary?

If other criteria for the selection of conjectures were built into the system, such as in the genes of a human, the growth of knowledge would be bounded to only conjectures meeting those criteria, even if the variation/conjecture aspect of the process were proceeding via a random process with no built-in knowledge. Fixed criteria means bounded knowledge, means no universality. So for unbounded progress (universality), the criteria must also be varied. But how are they criticized? What criteria for their selection can there be to avoid a regress, except survival?

All subsequent knowledge in the system will be descended from the initial knowledge. So all knowledge in a knowledge-growing system must be either created by or comprised of replicators.

There must be a minimum amount of available memory needed for a program to be a person. What can the program not do, below that minimum? What is that minimum M bits being used for that cannot be done with M-1 bits?

Gemini's response to that tweet: "The text uses legitimate biochemical concepts—like the fact that fluoride is a potent halogen that hardens minerals and can be toxic in high doses—to build a narrative based on skewed history. It fabricates a geological explanation for Hereford, Texas, to erase the very thing that actually protected the town's teeth: naturally occurring fluoride."

Is a quale a sequence of information states? Is this true of any given computation? Does the quale "care" if the states are computed afresh or read from memory?

Assuming qualia are classical, there is nothing stopping every step in the computation comprising them from being measured, like any computation. Then, nothing is stopping that recording/program from being rerun.

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.

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.