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Haha not a programmer so understood maybe half of it, but I think I see what you mean. There'll always be inexplicit parts to every explanation. My concept of explanations is that there must be at least some explicit part for it to be called an explanation. That's why genes aren't explanations.

That’s a valid point but doesn’t belong here. I have instead edited a related idea.

The pruning mechanism is part of it, but there’s more. Again, there’s also competition between ideas and even predatory behavior that can result in the elimination of ideas. All such phenomena taken together constitute natural selection in the mind.

… Rat Festers cite Popper and Deutsch as if they are infallible.

Shouldn’t it be ‘as if they were infallible’?

Fixed as of 2025-10-08.

Hardly anyone reads those, and many of those who do forget.

Let's fuck with your intuitions a little bit:

Say "stop" when it's no longer an explanation:

• Didactic chapter in plain English with examples and edge cases, distilled into a concise technical note with formal definitions, invariants, and pseudocode.

• Literate program interleaving prose and code, or a heavily commented Python implementation with docstrings and tests.

• The same code stripped of comments/tests and then minified or obfuscated (e.g., Python one‑liner, obfuscated C), up through esolangs and formalisms (Brainfuck, untyped lambda calculus with Church numerals, SKI combinators).

• Operational specifications with minimal labels (Turing machine tables), then hand‑written assembly without labels and self‑modifying tricks, down to raw machine code bytes/hex and binary blobs with unknown ISA or entry point.

• The same bits recast as DNA base mapping with unknown block codec, unknown compression, encrypted archives indistinguishable from noise, arbitrary bitstrings for unspecified UTMs, or physical media (flux/RF) without modulation specs.

Hmm never thought of that, interesting! I think since the disease involves continuous loss of brain volume, harsware decay seems like the best explanation.

In general I think it makes sense to speak of diseases in neurology (e.g. Alzheimer's, Parkinsons, stroke) as bad hardware and psychiatric disease as bad software. But it could very well be that some of those diagnoses are miscategorised.

It might worth stating that the aim of Veritula, along with the fallibilism philosophy, is that progress is both desirable ant attainable, and the way to get to progress is thru rational means. This means end to mysticism, supernatural and all other ideas that have an implicit underlying sentiment that a given thing is beyond our understanding.

Makes sense, thanks Dennis. Constant pruning is the explanation that retains scarcity and competition, while making the brain seem to have much more memory than it does.

I have speculated in the past that ideas compete for attention, but they also compete for any kind of memory, be it something like RAM or hard-disk memory. The RAM-like memory in the brain is presumably closely related to working memory, if not the same.

The reason most people don’t (permanently) run out memory (of either kind) isn’t that memory isn’t scarce but that there’s a pruning mechanism in the mind. And again, there’s competition. That competition can involve predatory ideas which disassemble the source code of other ideas and use it for themselves because that’s cheaper than to construct source code from scratch.

By the way, how is this a criticism? #2200 makes no mention of memory.

Everyone has scarce memory. Everyone’s brain has limited storage space.

Then you counter-criticize them for whatever you think they lack (which should be easy if they really aren’t good), thus addressing them and restoring the idea.

Then the idea should be revised to adjust or exclude the criticized part(s).

… I don’t yet know how to reconcile that, nor do I have a satisfactory alternative theory or criticism to offer.

Do #2140 and its children help as an alternative theory?

… I don’t yet know how to reconcile that, nor do I have a satisfactory alternative theory or criticism to offer.

You do know criticisms, see #2094.

We can criticize theories for lacking structure, resilience, depth, reach, etc. But again, if we want to avoid justificationism, theories that do have those attributes don’t get points for having them.

[L]abeling explanations as good or bad can itself be a form of positive argument.

Labeling them good, yes. But not labeling them bad.

Citations needed.

You retain that freedom. Veritula has no power over you. Being irrational is your prerogative (as long as you don’t violate anyone else’s consent in the process). Just don’t pretend to yourself or others that you’re being rational when you’re not.

That would be a pending criticism.

In the neo-Darwinian view, any replicator’s primary ‘concern’ is how to spread through the population at the expense of its rivals. This view is what Dawkins (IIRC) calls the gene’s eye view, and it applies to ideas as much as it does to genes. Any adaptation of any replicator is primarily in service of this concern.

So I think the answer to your question, “Are ideas also guesses of how to survive in the mind and across substrates …?”, is ‘yes’.

Well, if you were to open the letter anyway, and somebody criticized you for it, you could offer the following counter-criticisms: 1) you cannot be expected to adopt an idea while being prevented from entertaining it; 2) somebody artificially constructed a situation designed to abuse the literal content of the two rules in #2140 in order to violate their intention, which is to promote critical thinking and rationality; 3) just because ideas have no pending criticisms doesn’t mean you don’t get to question those ideas – otherwise no one could ever submit a first criticism.

What if I have an inexplicit criticism of the idea?