Tyler Mills

This is the only solution to the "apple problem" raised in #4752.
(Criticize this with alternatives solutions).

To clarify and add on to #4805: No, we couldn't program an LLM (on its own) to do random variation in the sense constituting evolution, because all of the randomly chosen changes to its outputs are still implicit from its current knowledge (training data + design from programmers). There is also no means of criticism that are not also implicit: any niche or criterion it generates, then seeks to satisfy, was derived again from its existing knowledge. It is a closed system (whether or not we have run it such as to reveal everything it implies!).

#4806 is saying: variations of knowledge being agnostic to that knowledge's meaning means they are not implicit from it, else implicit doesn't mean anything. So #4806 is only really asking if what matters is the source of knowledge, and that isn't really a criticism of #4805.
Criticism #4875 applies to #4806, as shown.

Yes, everything is not implied by everything else, so I think what we must mean by implicit is: can be deduced from/assembled using available transformations.

For knowledge to be truly novel in the sense of having come from creativity, it must not be deducible. Ambient, unjustified substrate is "taken from the environment" and filtered by selection. What survives can be increasingly truth-containing.

Mutations to a substrate, meaning blind mutations, not specific or designed, must not be implicit from the substrate; the result of their application cannot be deduced in any way... Otherwise the knowledge they might contain would already have been present...

Upon review, we should maybe say instead that personhood should not be defined solely in terms of tractability, which the bounty terms are not clear about. As it stands (bounty aside), I find myself still seeing tractability as an important aspect of epistemology and the mystery of personhood/knowledge creation, a hunch reinforced as I continue reading through "Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity" by Scott Aaronson: https://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/philos.pdf

This may be too subjective, but I've always really disliked end-of-line hyphenation, of the kind currently used here. I find it pretty disruptive to the flow of reading, AND a source of visual clutter. That's a heavy cost for the supposed benefit of a justified margin, but we don't seem to be getting that benefit here either; the margin still appears jagged. A justified margin itself is unnecessary, if you ask me, but it can in any case be accomplished the other way, where small spaces are distributed between words in each line as needed. To me the latter method of the two is better for readability, no contest. I would advocate for the third/default method, here (jagged margin, no funny business), since justified margins seems needlessly formal.

I agree that tractability is related to a given problem space, and that creativity is about reshaping the problem space, among other things. Given that I've been thinking of the problem space as the space of all explanations, I'm not sure where I stand... Maybe the "space of all explanations" framing is wrongheaded, because a mind never has any actionable knowledge of that space? We can discuss the space of all explanations in some sense, but we can't organize or describe it in any substantive way...

Also, per #4865, you helped me remember that personhood could involve intractable algorithms, but ones which only ever run with small inputs, since that can still be perfectly practical. Whether or not that means the whole person is a tractable algorithm or not, I'm not sure.

Between these points I think this is enough for you to claim the bounty, because it does argue that personhood "should not be defined in terms of tractability", per the bounty terms (italics mine, here). Tractability does not help explain personhood. Or, in any case, it doesn't seem like this line of discussion will be very fruitful (but this could itself be mistaken).

"Secondarily" meaning:
Implementations of an algorithm inherit the algorithm’s asymptotic behavior. If an implementation has a different asymptotic behavior than one algorithm, it is effectively a different algorithm.

Yes, my understanding is that the standard sense of tractable, for some algorithm, is: can be executed in time that grows at worst by a polynomial function of the input size. This is the sense I mean. The fixed task would be: create a given explanation in the space of all possible explanations.

Implementations of a given algorithm can be way more or less efficient in practice, though. Maybe personhood does require intractable algorithms, but ones which only ever run with small inputs... The question of the bounty is whether can we make a case for or against this. But part of the hope is also to learn if this whole framing is mistaken.

I think I see now, and agree with the above. Partly a semantics issue (yes, I'm thinking of an algorithm in the "formal" CS sense: an abstract/mathematical finite procedure). The scare quotes were meant to suggest that one could attempt to implement one algorithm, but the implementation may in fact be more closely implementing some other unrelated algorithm, but this is confusing.

At any rate, how ChatGPT summarized it makes sense to me:
"One function → many algorithms can compute it.
One algorithm → many implementations can realize it.
Complexity attaches primarily to algorithms, secondarily to implementations, and not to functions."

"Complexity" in the sense of growth behavior with input size? Further reading is still suggesting to me that this is intrinsic to a given algorithm (or class of them). Intrinsic to the math and logic. Implementations can be faster/slower/hungrier for a given input, but if they have different limiting behavior, aren't they different algorithms? I can see how an "implementation" of one algorithm in practice can accidentally change it to another algorithm.

This is a good point, related to Dirk's #4813. As far as the bounty goes, I think my response in #4823 applies here as well, however. To refine it:
Recognizing, criticizing, and being able to understand explanations could all be requisites for tractably synthesizing any possible explanation. The bounty regards whether the tractability requirement can be done without.

It seems like a mind being able to create, recognize, understand and differentiate (etc.) good explanations are necessary but not sufficient criteria for personhood; if that process is intractable, then beyond a certain amount of current knowledge (considering that as the input to the process), the person effectively cannot continue with it... so that compromises the universality.

They must be able to create, recognize and understand any given explanation, and maintain that ability as their knowledge grows, ad infinitum...

Yeah, I'm not sure why I wrote this... I remember the option for number of criticisms now. I guess it slipped my mind.

The "Battle tested" badge should have a hyphen!
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/battle-tested

Bounties could pay out multiplicatively, up to a limit (e.g. 10$ per criticism, up to 3). This would preserve the incentive for bounty hunting after one criticism has already been posted.

Related to this or not, it could be useful to be able to set a bounty on a set of ideas, rather than just one. "Criticize any of these ideas for n$".

The main thread is ambiguous currently, by that reasoning: it's always gray. Having the whole thing red to indicate one or more pending criticisms below seems useful, and cool. And the offshoots from the main thread (the little curly part leading to each sub-idea) can have the new colors.

E.g.: User scrolls down the main bright red thread, past gray comment offshoots and dim red refuted criticism offshoots, until reaching the bright red pending criticisms offshoot that is the cause of the main thread being bright red. (!)

Currently, a single gray "thread" comes off an idea, and splits off into sub-ideas. A single criticism in the above scheme would turn the whole thread red, which is ambiguous.