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Fixed as of recently. Emails now quote the parent idea.
All of my criticisms notwithstanding, I actually agree with your conclusion that it may be possible in principle for life to spread into space. Like you, I see why that would be hard but not why it would be impossible.
(To anyone inclined to criticize this idea: consider criticizing #2366 instead so the criticism chain remains intact – unless there’s specifically something about my idea here as distinct from Erik’s that you want to criticize.)
Their mode of replication differs, as each new guess in genes must be neutral or positive for the vehicle. [Emphasis added.]
I share the gene’s-eye view advocated by Dawkins: changes are to be judged by how they affect the replicator’s ability to spread through the population, not by how they affect the individual organism (or “vehicle”, as you called it).
This difference matters because sometimes changes hurt an individual organism while increasing a replicator’s ability to spread. If a replicator that reduces its organism’s lifespan is better able to spread through the population at the expense of its rivals, then that’s what it will do.
Their mode of replication differs, as each new guess in genes must be neutral or positive for the vehicle.
I think the word ‘as’ is strictly speaking false here. As in: even if it were true that each genetic change must be neutral or positive, that wouldn’t be the reason genes and memes have different modes of replication.
Assuming by ‘mode’ you mean ‘mechanism’, the difference is that genes don’t need to be expressed to be replicated whereas memes do. The reason for this difference is that one person has no direct visibility into other people’s brains to copy memes ‘wholesale’ – they can only make guesses based on the behavior they see. Whereas the enzymes involved in the replication of DNA do get to direct access to the entire DNA molecule.
[E]ach new guess in genes must be neutral or positive for the vehicle.
I don’t think that’s true. I remember Deutsch saying something like this but I think he’s confused about evolution.
Not every genetic change that isn’t an improvement or neutral is automatically deleterious. A replicator could go through a series of changes that temporarily reduce its ability to spread through the population until it undergoes another change that raises that ability above the original level.
To reason, within any epistemology, means to follow and apply that epistemology.
Some epistemologies are defined too poorly to be able to tell when you’re following or straying from it.
I notice that when I amend a criticism I have made, I’m not able to see what I am criticising. It would be good if the edit screen showed the comment I am disagreeing with similar to how it does when I first go to write a criticism.
Utility is not a necessary aspect of money.
Money without other use cases only holds value to the degree it can continuously win a Keynesian Beauty Contest in the market.
In other words, it has no underlying value.
The price of a commodity and the quantity of it in use don’t strictly correlate in the way you suggest here. 50% of gold being tied up in industry, jewellery, etc. does not mean the price floor is at 50% of the current price.
By the standard you have set here, you have implicitly disqualified Bitcoin and Zcash. If gold is not good enough because it could fall to its price floor (your claim being 50%), then Bitcoin and Zcash are even worse because they have no floor at all. It might be more precise to say the floor is zero.
Thanks. Do you think the aim in abstract fields (such as mathematics) is correspondence as well? (As Deutsch seems to argue with the idea of perfect propositions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZ-opI-jghs).
…you only think we need it to explain progress in science.
No, I think progress in science is explained by error correction. The aim of science is correspondence. There’s a difference between aims and means.
Are you asking if there can be correspondence between two abstractions? Or between a physical object and an abstraction?
Only 5-10% of gold's value is tied to its industrial use (per chatgpt).
ChatGPT is notoriously unreliable and known for making stuff up. I recommend using a different, human-made source. Should be easy to find one using your search engine of choice.
The reason to back a currency with gold or some other commodity is that the commodity has other utility aside from being used as money. This sets a floor on the price, making it a store of value.
It looks like you were trying to quote the parent idea. Be sure to use either quotation marks or, for blockquotes, start each paragraph with a > sign. That’s the markdown way to specify a blockquote so it gets the red border on the left.
For example, if you type:
> this will appear as a blockquote
…it will turn into:
this will appear as a blockquote
Check the preview to correct errors as you draft a reply.
The reason to back a currency with gold or some other commodity is that the commodity has other utility aside from being used as money. This sets a floor on the price, making it a store of value.
Bitcoin and Zcash have no utility beyond their transferability. The only way either would ever be money is if a government made it their legal tender, forcing transactions to be done with it exclusively.
To use US Dollar as an example again, the only reason it is money is that it has the alternative utility function of being the only thing the government will accept for tax payments. In that sense it is the only currency that keeps you out jail if you use it in its designated geographical area (!). If that weren’t the case then people would quickly swap to using something else—something that isn’t being manipulated by the government.
(To prevent any confusion, please understand that I believe governments should be completely agnostic to how people carry out their transactions, including allowing them to use any currency and even old-school barter if they wish.)
TL;DR The only way for the US Dollar, or Bitcoin, or Zcash (or any other unbacked currencies) to be useful as money is if a government makes them legal tender, and prohibits anything else being used in transactions.
You misunderstood my criticism. I said the US Federal Reserve Notes used to be backed by gold, not that the gold itself was backed by something.
See here. Lucas had asked:
Can you say more about why we need correspondence to make sense of the concept of self-similarity? I don't see why. And it seems to me that self-similarity is all we need to make sense of the universality of computation.
My response below. For others reading this, Erik has also since started a dedicated discussion on the topic of correspondence: https://veritula.com/discussions/is-correspondence-true-in-cr
The FoR glossary entry on self-similarity from chapter 4 reads:
self-similarity Some parts of physical reality (such as symbols, pictures or human thoughts) resemble other parts. The resemblance may be concrete, as when the images in a planetarium resemble the night sky; more importantly, it may be abstract, as when a statement in quantum theory printed in a book correctly explains an aspect of the structure of the multiverse.
The way I read that, it means the images in the planetarium correspond to the night sky. Otherwise we wouldn’t consider them similar.
From chapter 6, on the universality of computation and how “various parts of reality can resemble one another”:
The set of all behaviours and responses of that one object exactly mirrors the set of all behaviours and responses of all other physically possible objects and processes.
That means there is one-to-one correspondence between the behaviors and responses of the first object and those of all the other objects. This is basically another way to describe the self-similarity property of the universe.
From chapter 10, in the context of mathematics (italics mine):
… the physical behaviour of the symbols corresponds to the behaviour of the abstractions they denote.
(The same is true of the physical parts of a Turing machine harnessing the self-similarity property of the universe to correspond to other physical objects.)
From chapter 14, in the context of the creation of scientific knowledge (which, AFAIK, DD views as increasing correspondence):
The creation of useful knowledge by science … must be understood as the emergence of the self-similarity that is mandated by a principle of physics, the Turing principle.
It’s been ages since I read FoR so I’m relying on word searches in the ebook but it’s full of these links between self-similarity and correspondence.
a knowledge
I don’t think it’s correct to use the word ‘knowledge’ with an indeterminate article (meaning ‘a’ or ‘an’).
You could say ‘Finding problems that some knowledge addresses…’
Presumably, Zelalem wanted to delete the idea. Veritula purposely doesn’t have that functionality. In the future, Zelalem, just leave the idea and criticize it for being outdated or superseded or whatever reason you have for rejecting it.
When we try to solve a problem, we might find out that we've already solved it, but that only happens after we have looked at the problem.
That still means we solved the problem before we encountered it.
I understand you want to stress that we usually solve a problem after we identify it. Your text already covers that. So I’d still just remove the sentence “We can't solve a problem we haven't encountered yet.” because it’s not true.