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Hmm, I'll try to formulate in another way what I was getting at, not sure if you still disagree with this:

• My guess is that the selection mechanism can't be specified at all in the evolutionary algorithm, because every such specification is a restriction of universality. Reality has to do the selection.

Abortion is a technology problem, not a political issue. The choice between the loss of life and the loss of authority over one’s own body is a poor one. This dilemma is caused by a lack of medical knowledge.

At a high level, there are only two technologies needed to resolve this dilemma.
1. Safe extraction of a living pregnancy.
2. In Vitro Gestation.

In fact, if some of the political funding had been redirected toward research, it would probably be solved by now.

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.

That sounds right but how is it a criticism of my idea? It’s the ideas the mind evolves that change the landscape, no?

In biological evolution, the landscape itself never changes directly. It only happens as a consequence of evolving genes.

Guess: The same is true in the "landscape" of the mind: Individual ideas mutate and evolve in relation to problems, and that's what constitutes the landscape.

Another way to approach AGI? (Very early, preliminary thoughts.)

Say you write an evolutionary algorithm, like the ones that have been written before. Then DD would argue it’ll get stuck because all it can do is explore a given landscape for its best features. Whereas real evolution creates new landscapes.

To address this issue, you subject your algorithm itself to variation and selection, by wrapping it in another evolutionary algorithm. But this approach just kicks the can down the road because now it’s the space of programs that’s limited.

How do you break out of this limitation?

You can’t just keep wrapping your programs in evolutionary algorithms like that because that only keeps kicking the can down the road. It’s like adding more and more entries to a multiplication table. It’s not the same as a multiplication algorithm. But for evolution, the problem is harder, in a way, because not even recursion solves the issue, and the starting point wasn’t as ‘flat’ as a multiplication table. The starting point is already an algorithm, not just a list.

What’s needed, in DD’s lingo, is a jump to universality. But a jump to what kind of universality, exactly?

cc @tyler-mills

A quale can be recorded and replayed later, arbitrarily many times.

How do you know this?

A quale can be recorded and replayed later, arbitrarily many times. That looping program is not a person: it can only create whatever knowledge it originally did, not any possible knowledge, maybe until freed from the loop. Yet it still constitutes experience.
So people are not the only programs that can be qualia.

True that a person need not create new knowledge, but a looping quale is not a person, per #5035, so the claim survives this criticism.

True, knowledge could be created from each run of a quale, but a looping quale isn't a person, per #5035, so the claim in #5031 that not only people can undergo experience still stands.

Should clarify that personhood is: can create any new knowledge in principle (excluding resource constraints). A program consisting of a looping quale cannot create any possible knowledge, whether or not it is creating some each time it's run.

A looping quale is also not a person because personhood is not just: can create a given piece of new knowledge, it is: can create any knowledge (not just that created by this quale; again assuming knowledge creation defines qualia).

If qualia are only present when new knowledge is being made, then for a quale to be replayed it could be that there must be a reset each time: the knowledge produced from the previous run is erased. So w.r.t. the AGI system alone, new knowledge is being created each time (it doesn't matter if the knowledge is copied from a previous run and stored elsewhere, in which case it is not new w.r.t. that combined system).

Actually maybe this isn't so obvious. A person need not create new knowledge for the personhood property to be present, since it is a counterfactual property: a person can create new knowledge (new and non-inferable, I argue).

A quale can be recorded and replayed later, arbitrarily many times. That looping program is not a person (no knowledge is created, however many times it loops, for instance), but it still constitutes experience.
So people are not the only programs that can be qualia.

Some people are lactose intolerant, others are vegan.

I’m pro abortion but I have some pro life in me.

Banning the abortion of a zygote seems ridiculous. So does aborting a seven-month-old fetus.

Why not go with: you can abort until the nervous system develops.

Clearly, an embryo without a nervous system can’t be sentient and thus can’t be a person, right? And as long as it’s not a person, it doesn’t have any rights.

According to https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK542179/, “CNS [central-nervous-system] development begins during the 3rd week of embryogenesis…”

This idea is for viable pregnancies only. Other considerations may apply for non-viable ones.

Link is dead.

You can just eat fiber with your meals instead, that will slow down insulin secretion afaik.

Some people are lactose intolerant.

One is that it's a way of reducing body fat, and overweight is likely a bigger problem for many people than potential short term negatives of fasting.

When a question is a criticisms, you want to mark your answer as a criticism too so it counts as answered.

I tried to look for good arguments against eating dairy for it being dairy and I cannot find any.

Protein above 0.8 g/kg of lean mass is desirable, often up to around 2 g/kg.