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My Conjecture

Conjecture: addiction is the result of the entrenchment of a conflict between two or more preferences in a mind.

Picture someone who wants to give up social media but also really enjoys social media. Those preferences conflict.

If the conflict is entrenched, then both preferences get to live on indefinitely. The entrenchment will not let that person give up social media. He will become addicted.

As I write in #4624, curing addiction involves finding a common preference between the conflicting parts of the addict’s mind: something all involved parts prefer to their initial positions. In addition, it may involve Randian ideas around introspection and getting one’s reason and emotions in the proper order.

Limitations

I don’t know whether my explanation applies to physical addictions. For example, I understand severe alcoholics run the risk of death if they quit cold turkey, so for them, it can’t be only about preferences. There’s clearly a physical component as well. So I’m limiting my thoughts on addiction to what we might call ‘addictions of the mind.’ Note, though, that addictions could come in pairs: an alcoholic could have both a physical and a mental addiction to alcohol.

Also, I don’t claim that entrenchment always causes addiction, or that every addiction is the result of entrenchment. I claim that entrenchment is a cause – maybe a common cause – of addiction. I also claim that curing addictions of the mind is an epistemological matter, not a medical/scientific one.

Yes, but they’ll need to be aware of the conflict, at which point both conflicting ideas/preferences exist in both minds. So that scenario reduces to a conflict of preferences inside a single mind.

Yes, but they’ll need to be aware of the conflict, at which point both conflicting ideas/preferences exist in both minds.

Idea: does the entrenchment not even strictly need to be between preferences that are both inside the same mind?

Could entrenchment between preferences across minds also cause addiction for at least one or both of them?

Be sure to mention the title of your book so others can look it up :)

Re consciously deciding to do something: once you’ve automatized some behavior, it’s hard to undo it just by virtue of being automatized, not necessarily because of entrenchment.

The trouble with ‘consciously deciding’ to do something in any case is that the conscious parts of your mind may be on board but other parts may not. But that discrepancy itself need not be entrenched.

Re consciously deciding to do something: once you’ve automatized some behavior, it’s hard to undo it just by virtue of being automatized, not necessarily because of entrenchment.

If you feel bad when you force yourself to stop doing something, you might feel bad because of the force, not because of the habit. My guess is they’re thinking more in terms of static memes.

The part about entrenched habits gets pretty close, though it doesn’t say much about the nature of the entrenchment or how to solve it.

I just noticed that the old TCS glossary has an entry on entrenchment and entrenched habits:

Entrenched ideas are ideas that you are unable to abandon even when they fail to survive rational criticism in your mind.

An entrenched habit is something that you can't stop doing even if you consciously decide to, or which makes you feel bad when you consciously force yourself to stop doing it.

I’ve looked at the glossary many times over the years, so maybe the seeds of my ideas about addiction came from it.

I just noticed that the old TCS glossary has an entry on entrenchment and entrenched habits:

Entrenched ideas are ideas that you are unable to abandon even when they fail to survive rational criticism in your mind.

An entrenched habit is something that you can't stop doing even if you consciously decide to, or which makes you feel bad when you consciously force yourself to stop doing it.

This is pretty cool! I think the part about entrenched habits gets pretty close, though it doesn’t say much about the nature of the entrenchment or how to solve it. Also, if you feel bad when you force yourself to stop doing something, you might feel bad because of the force, not because of the habit. My guess is they’re thinking more in terms of static memes.

Re consciously deciding to do something: once you’ve automatized some behavior, it’s hard to undo it just by virtue of being automatized, not necessarily because of entrenchment. The trouble with ‘consciously deciding’ to do something in any case is that the conscious parts of your mind may be on board but other parts may not. But that discrepancy itself need not be entrenched.

All that said, I’ve looked at the glossary many times over the years, so it’s definitely possible the seeds of my ideas about addiction came from it.

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, never mind tractability.

By this standard, a random number generator has universal creativity as well, and is therefore a person. So there must be a standard for personhood other than: able to generate any possible explanation. Such as: can do that tractably.

By this standard, a random number generator has universal creativity as well, and is therefore a person. So there must be a standard for personhood other than: able to generate any possible explanation. Such as: can do that tractably.

By this standard, a random number generator has universal creativity as well, and is therefore a person. So there must be standard for personhood other than: able to generate any possible explanation. Such as: can do that tractably.

Nature does have universal creativity; it can generate any possible knowledge. And all possible knowledge exists somewhere in reality.

But nature created genetic knowledge from nothing. So this is an example of something which does not have universal creativity which created knowledge ex nihilo.

This also admits of the distinction between AI and AGI (and "universal creativity") as being whether the system is capable of creating knowledge ex nihilo, as argued by Deutsch. Only universal creativity could create knowledge from nothing. Bounded creativity must start with something.

I keep returning to the notion of the space or domain in which simulated evolution so far operates in. It seems like we can say that current sim'd evolution can discover new knowledge via conjecture and criticism, but it is always bound by a domain predefined by fitness functions, automatic evaluators and so on, even if that domain itself contains many subdomains.

Then we can say that in nature, and in the minds of people, there is no externally defined space in which exploration is happening; the space is also evolving, also subject to criticism. I suspect this is part of how open-endedness comes about.

But the immediate question here was how to explain why AI is or is not "creative". Saying AIs are "narrowly creative" seems it could work, or saying they are creative within a fixed domain. The common intuition I think is that current AIs are "truly" creative, and I would say this is because the predefined domain (of LLMs, for instance) is gigantic, being sculpted by an internet-sized training corpus. But I suppose we should argue that "true creativity" means universal creativity.

I was curious if there are criticisms of the argument that current AI does legitimately create new knowledge.

This seems to me to be the same distinction that Deutsch and others have made between the genetic evolution we can simulate through evolutionary algorithms and the kind we actually observe in nature. I think it would be helpful to investigate evolutionary algorithms a bit further if you want to develop a clear distinction. This is how I describe it in my book:

There are several mechanisms that genes use to create variants, including sex, mutation, gene flow, and genetic drift, all of which appear to introduce change randomly. But we now know it cannot be entirely random. Something more is shaping what gets trialed, because when we model and simulate evolution using random changes, we never see the sort of novelties that arose in nature. We see optimization. We see exploitation. We see organisms become better at using resources they already use. But we never see a genuinely new use of a resource emerge. A fin may become better at swimming, but it does not become a limb. A metabolism may become more efficient, but it does not open up an entirely new biological pathway. And yet the natural world is full of exactly such extraordinary adaptations.

Move 37 was not explicitly present in the training data, nor designed by the programmers, and is extremely hard to vary (Deutsch's criterion for good explanations). Was the move present implicitly in the design of the system and/or the training data? Or inexplicitly? Does either of these mean the discovery of the move was non-creative?

Since evolution created genetic knowledge from nothing, it can be said to have the same "narrow creativity" as AI. The confusion over whether AI "is creative" can be resolved by saying that it is, but only narrowly (like evolution), and that the creativity defining people is universal, not limited to any domain. AI creates knowledge in domains it was designed for; AGI can create knowledge in all possible domains, each of which it designs itself.

AIs have created output that is not only novel, but seems to constitute new knowledge (resilient information), such as the famous Move 37 from AlphaGo. That is new knowledge because the move was not present in the training data explicitly, nor did the designers construct it.

Evidence that addiction and procrastination are related: https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-stop-procrastinating-and-addiction-to-the-internet
The person in that link asks, “How do I stop procrastinating and addiction to the internet?”

Of course it's true that a system confined to a given abstraction will only evolve theories of that scale. But a person can operate at all computable levels of abstraction. The growth of knowledge by people (e.g. Relativity) would only have happened if people can vary their abstractions arbitrarily, because Relativity solves no problems at any one given level of abstraction, but across many. Observer Theory might be right for certain systems, but is wrong for people.