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Scarcity of resources should not be assumed. You want underlying necessity of the mechanism, not a strained analogy. There is no scarcity for idea resources.

The change in population of a replicator is non-specific to its content?

The capital allocated to a business is non-specific to its content? Conflating with the prices of a good?

But the extinction of a replicator by destroying its last instance does seem absolute, unlike the change in its population, which I suggest is non-specific to the content in #5133.

Yes, the quantity variable is instantiated in the collective physical substrate comprising all of the replicator instances.

Wouldn't it have to be instantiated in the overall system itself, which contains the replicators (among other things?)? Otherwise, how could that variable be a form of criticism by the system?

None of the replicators have that information. If that quantity variable exists, it's instantiated somewhere else.

How is the quantity of a replicator not based in the same medium as the replicator?

Non-specific criticisms, those not taking into account the content of their target, are always "analogue" (or quantitative as opposed to qualitative) in the sense of being based on a variable whose quantity changes in a medium distinct from that hosting the knowledge it is serving as criticism for. (E.g. capital allocation in an economy; number of instances of a replicator.)

Specific criticisms, those taking into account the content of their target, are always discrete and absolute because they identify a contradiction. (E.g. criticisms of a scientific theory.)

Why aren't mutations made to DNA a form of conjecture? I think of conjecture as being a pretty general term -- isn't all knowledge conjectural, ours or otherwise? Maybe semantics. Agreed that criticism is a subset of selection: selection that is a function of the knowledge in the target, perhaps? Whereas differential replication is how selection proceeds without referring to the specific knowledge in the target..? [Overall idea stands despite my concession above]

Maybe natural selection logically does not require death, but when we introduce a scarcity of resources, isn't death an inevitable byproduct? Eventually, the best replicating will be those which take the resources from others? If no death, then number of entities increases without bound. So any real system will have it, or will stop functioning when the limit is reached.

It's sort of like: the "this is replicating less" criticism has no actual weight to it unless there is a point beneath which any less fecundity = bye-bye.
**If things with arbitrarily low fecundity are left intact forever, how is differential replication a criticism?**

No, my thinking here is that any given set of knowledge can only do inference: apply what transformations it has to whatever data it has, and that's it. It can't output things that are not already implicit in it, so cannot grow, in any epistemic sense. Even if running some kind of evolutionary procedure. An external source of novelty is required for growth, with respect to any given set of knowledge.

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)?

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?

Natural selection requires differential replication, not death. (Death is just an extreme form of differential replication, when compared to any allele that does replicate.)

Natural selection requires differential replication, not death. (Death is just an form of extreme differential replication, when compared to any allele that does replicate.)

Did you mean "Any given set of knowledge cannot grow itself inferentially"?

I think it is a mistake to say or imply that variation and selection IS conjecture and criticism. At best C&C is the subset of V&S that occurs in minds. The biosphere doesn’t actually conjecture anything.

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)...

No because 1) there’s always a finite amount of deeply nested criticisms, and 2) the discussion graph is acyclic.

should_adopt? and pending_criticisms are implemented in terms of each other. Doesn’t that cause an infinite regress?

Recursive Epistemology

Veritula implements a recursive epistemology. For a criticism to be pending, it can’t have any pending criticisms itself, and so on, in a deeply nested fashion.

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def should_adopt? idea
  pending_criticisms(idea).none?
end

def pending_criticisms idea
  criticisms(idea).filter { |c| should_adopt?(c) }
end

def criticisms idea
  children(idea).filter(&:criticism?)
end

This approach is different from non-recursive epistemologies, which handle criticisms differently. For example, they might not consider deeply nested criticisms when determining whether an idea is currently criticized.