It seems possibly quite important to this experience that you not have electronics or other “bed activities” that you can be doing (depending on your goal here)
Maybe something like “Don’t have anything within arms reach of you bed” so there’s no particular slope towards reading or electronics or whatnot, and if you do whole-heartedly start reading, you first had to get out of bed and grab the book.
In theory you might, but in practice you can’t. Distraction-avoidant behavior favors things that you can get into quickly, on the order of seconds—things like checking for Facebook notifications, or starting a game which has a very fast load time. Most intellectual work has a spinup, while you recreate mental context, before it provides rewards, so distraction-avoidant behavior doesn’t choose it.
Hmmm..I think personal experience tells me that distraction-avoidant behaviour will still choose intellectual work, as long as it is quicker than the alternative.
I might choose a game over writing a LW shortform but I will still choose a LW shortform over writing a novel.
There’s a second-level to this that I think the game would need to reach in order to work. One worry I’d have is that in competitive play, the response might not be a flourishing of interesting creative programming strategies, but “everyone just copies the best strategies and builds macros for them”.
The ideal version of this IMO would have some properties where the gameplay is varied enough that there are different higher-order programming things you’ll need to figure out on the fly.
That said, this exists, and might be kinda what you want:
It would be a nice addition to games, if instead of having a point where they can get boring (after mastery has been achieved), instead having another level where tools (or tools for making tools) become gradually available to assist, and eventually replace, the player.
In my experience, the motion that seems to prevent mental crowding-out is intervening on the timing of my thinking: if I force myself to spend longer on a narrow question/topic/idea than is comfortable, eg with a timer, I’ll eventually run out of cached thoughts and spot things I would have otherwise missed.
I’ve found the “set a 5 minute timer” meme to not-quite-work because it takes me like 15 minutes just to get all my cached thoughts out, before I get to anything original. But yeah this basic idea here is a big part of my “actually thinking for real” toolkit.
Anna writes about bucket errors . Attempted summary: sometimes two facts are mentally tracked by only one variable; in that case, correctly updating the belief about one fact can also incorrectly update the belief about the other fact, so it is sometimes epistemic to flinch away from the truth of the first fact (until you can create more variables to track the facts separately).
There’s a conjugate error: two actions are bound together in one “lever”.
For example, I want to clean my messy room. But somehow it feels pointless / tiring, even before I’ve started. If I just started cleaning anyway, I’d get bogged down in some corner, trying to make a bunch of decisions about where exactly to put lots of futzy random objects, tiring myself out and leaving my room still annoyingly cluttered. It’s not that there’s a necessary connection between cleaning my room and futzing around inefficiently; it’s that the only lever I have right now that activates the “clean room” action also activates the “futz interminably” action.
What I want instead is to create a lever that activates “clean room” but not “futz”, e.g. by explicitly noting the possibility to just put futzy stuff in a box and not deal with it more. When I do that, I feel motivated to clean my messy room. I think this explains some “akrasia”.
The general pattern: I want to do X to acheive some goal, but the only way (that I know how right now) to do X is if I also do Y, and doing Y in this situation would be bad. Flinching away from action toward a goal is often about protecting your goals.
Just because someone is right about something or is competent at something, doesn’t mean you have to or ought to: do what they do; do what they tell you to do; do what’s good for them; do what they want you to do; do what other people think that person wants you to do; be included in their plans; be included in their confidence; believe what they believe; believe important what they believe important. If you don’t keep this distinction, then you might have a bucket error about “X is right about / good at Y” and “I have to Z” for some Z mentioned above, and Z might require a bunch of bad stuff, and so you will either not want to admit that X is good at Y, or else you will stop tracking in general when people are good at Y, or stop thinking Y matters (whereas by default you did think Y matters). Meritocracy (rule of the meritorious) isn’t the same thing as… meritognosis(?) (knowing who is meritorious). In general, -cracy is only good in some situations.
This is a good point. I’d do well to remember that repeated phrases stick in the mind: I’m currently on a bit of a reification spree where I’m giving names to a whole bunch of personal concepts (like moods, mental tools, etc) and since I would like these phrases to stick in the mind I think I shall repeat them.
So I guess the issue here is having a tool which parses and edits PDFs to insert hyperlinks. That’s hard. Even if you solve the lookup problem by going through something like Semantic Scholar (the way I use https://ricon.dev/ on gwern.net for reverse citation search), PDFs aren’t made for this: when you look at a bit of text which is the name of a book or paper, it may not even be text, it may just be an image… Plus, your links will die. You shouldn’t trust any of those sites to stay up long-term at the exact URLs they are at.
About links dying; One way to solve this would be if we used peer-to-peer networks for documents like PDFs. I’m excited about dat protocol for things like this, though it will need more popularity of course.
https://docs.datproject.org/docs/intro
It seems like our current URL system is quite poor in comparison.
Generally, apprenticeships should have planned obsolescence. A pattern I’ve seen in myself and others: A student takes a teacher. They’re submissive, in a certain sense—not giving up agency, or harming themselves, or following arbitrarily costly orders, or being overcredulous; but rather, a narrow purely cognition-allocating version of assuming a low-status stance: deferring to local directions of attention by the teacher, provisionally accepting some assumptions, taking a stance of trying to help the teacher with the teacher’s work. This is good because it enhances the bandwidth and depth of transmission of tacit knowledge from the teacher.
But, for many students, it shouldn’t be the endpoint of their development. At some point they should be questioning all assumptions, directing their attention and motivation on all levels, being the servant of their own plans. When this is delayed, e.g. the teacher or the student or something else is keeping the student within a fixed submissive role, the student is stunted, bitter, wasted, restless, jerked around, stagnant. In addition to lines of retreat from social roles, have lines of developmental fundamental change.
Say Alice is making some point to Bob, and Carol is listening and doesn’t like the point and tries to stop Alice from making the point to Bob. What might be going on? What is Carol trying to do, and why? She might think Alice is lying / disinforming—basing her arguments on false information or invalid arguments with false conclusions. But often that’s not what Carol reports; rather, even if Alice’s point is true and her arguments are valid reasoning from true information, and Carol could be expected to know that or at least not be so sure that’s not the case, Carol still wants to stop Alice from making the point. It’s a move in a “culture war”.
But what does that even mean? We might steelman Carol as implicitly working from an assumption like: maybe Alice’s literal, decoupled point is true; but no one’s a perfect decoupler, and so Bob might still make mistaken inferences from Alice’s true point, leading Bob to do bad things and spread disinformation. Another interpretation is more Simulacra: the claims have no external meaning, it’s a war for power over the narrative, and you want to say your side’s memes and block the other side’s memes.
Here’s a third interpretation, close to the Simulacra one, but with a clarification: maybe part of what’s going on, is that Bob does know how to check local consistency of his ideology, even though he lacks the integrative motive or skill to evaluate his whole position by modeling the world. So Bob is going to copy one or another ideology being presented. From within the reach of Bob’s mind, the conceptual vocabularies of opposed ideologies don’t have many shared meanings, even though on their own they are coherent and describe at least some of the world recognizably well. So there’s an exclusion principle: since Bob can’t assimilate the concepts of an ideology opposed to his into his vocabulary, unless given a large activation push, Bob will continue gaining fluency in his current vocabulary while the other vocabulary bounces off of him. However, talking to someone is enough activation energy to at least gain a little fluency, if only locally and temporarily, with their vocabulary. Carol may be worried that if there’s too many instances of various Alices successfully explaining points to Bob, then Bob will get enough fluency to be “over the hump” and will start snowballing more fluency in the opposing ideology, and eventually might switch loyalties.
Persian messenger: “Listen carefully, Leonidas. Xerxes conquers and controls everything he rests his eyes upon. He leads an army so massive it shakes the ground with its march, so vast it drinks the rivers dry. All the God-King Xerxes requires is this: a simple offering of earth and water. A token of Sparta’s submission to the will of Xerxes.”
[...]
Persian messenger: “Choose your next words carefully, Leonidas. They may be your last as king.”
[...]
Leonidas: “Earth and water… You’ll find plenty of both down there.” [indicates the well with his sword]
Persian messenger: “No man, Persian or Greek, no man threatens a messenger!”
Leonidas: “You bring the crowns and heads of conquered kings to my city’s steps! You insult my queen. You threaten my people with slavery and death! Oh, I’ve chosen my words carefully, Persian, while yours are lashed from your lips by the whip of your God-King. I’ll give you a final chance to live with justice: give up your fearful allegiance to your slavemaster Xerxes, do not speak his threats for him any more, and come live in Greece as a free man.”
Persian messenger: “This is blasphemy! This is madness!”
Leonidas: “Madness? THIS IS SPARTA!” [kicks the Persian messenger into the deep well]
But why does thingspace have clusters?
Many objects are made by processes; if the same process makes many objects, those products will have many things in common.
Examples of clusters: Members of a species. Species in a clade. Species occupying similar niches (e.g., birds and flying insects have stuff in common not shared by other animals). Photocopies of something. Fragrances. Metals. Stars. Fascist states. Philosophers. Vector spaces. Etc.
Some categories seem to have certain features in common “only” because the category is selected for those features. E.g. “rock”. Is a mountain a rock? “A rock” is prototypically grippable-size. A rock the size of a person is a “big rock”, and a bigger rock is a boulder, etc. Much smaller, and it’s a pebble or a grain. I don’t think rocks, broadly construed, actually have a tendency to be grippable-size. We can still construe this as a genuine cluster, but it’s more relational, not purely intrinsic to the [objects, as completely external to the observer]. It’s not a trivial cluster; e.g. a prototypical rock can be knapped [by human hands], whereas a gigantic or tiny rock can’t be knapped [by human hands] in the same sense. But we can view it’s cluster-ness as partly not about empirical external [observer-independent] clustering. (There’s nothing postmodern or whatever about this, of course; just noting that it’s a cluster of relations with something else, and also the something-else happens to be the observer, so it’d be a mistake to think there’s a preexisting tendency of rocks to be several centimeters wide.) ISTM there’s some tension between this, and the background of talking about thingspace: we talk about thingspace from a place of aspiring to make maps, plus a belief that, when trying to make accurate maps, it’s good engineering to have ideas that act mentally in the same way that parts of the world act in the world. But in the case of “a rock” there’s a weird mixing of ideas: the concept of “a rock”, and the mental stuff involved in making there be such a thing (e.g. skill in knapping).
Why are human eyes clustered? Here are some answers:
Because they are generated by the same process: adaptation of the human genome-pool to the human ecological niche. That is, human eyes share most of their causal history, up until a few L4s—L6s of years ago. (L notation)
Because they play the role, in the human organism, of vision.
Because embryonic and physiological systems homeostatically create and preserve eyes in a narrow range along many dimensions, so they don’t just degenerate / mutate.
To be clear, the question isn’t “why are human eyes similar?”. The question is, “why is there a cluster; why are there many things that are {spherical, have a retina and cornea and circular iris and blood vessels, are pointed by muscles so the pupil-retina axes intersect on an object, are a couple cm wide, sit in bony sockets, resolve light into an image with a precision of about L-3.5 radians, have a ~circular fovea, etc.} and way fewer things with most but not ~all of these features?”.
So the question isn’t, “why do eyes have these features?”, but more like, in the space of things, why do almost all things that have most of these features have ~all of these features? (NB: the list I gave probably doesn’t pin down human eyes as distinct from, I think, maybe some other primate eyes, maybe some bird eyes, probably other eyes; but we could make such a list, e.g. by being more specific about the size, the proteins used, the distribution and types of photosensitive cells, etc.)
What about metal? We encounter metal that’s highly processed, optimized via homeostatic engineering to be this or that alloy with this or that ratio of such and such metals, heated and cooled and beaten to settle in a certain way. IIUC, native metals do have a cluster structure, but it’s pretty messy; gold usually comes with silver, copper comes with tin and arsenic and so on; how much depends on where you find it. But also there’s totally a cluster structure of metal: if you process it, you can separate out one kind from another, chemically react it to undo compounding such as rust, etc. There’s clusters, but they’re hidden. Why are they there? Why is there such a thing as iron or copper? Also why is there such a thing as metal? (The question isn’t, “why is metal shiny?” or “why is metal conductive?” or “why is metal hard?”, but rather, “why, among the elements, do those features correlate?”.)
Is there something in common between the answers to “why is there such a thing as metal?” and “why is there such a thing as the human eye?”?
Attractor states. The world is a multi-level dynamical system. Dynamical systems have attractor states. These attractor states are stereotyped, i.e. clustered. E.g. the elements exist because nuclei with certain numbers of protons and neutrons are the attractor states (or rather, attractor factors of the state space), and then nuclear structure implies features of elements. You don’t get long thin strands of nucleons, or nucleons spaced out by L-12m (atoms have nucleons that are ~L-14.5m apart); those aren’t stable, and aren’t attractors, or at least their basins of attraction are small. Why isn’t there a continuum of attractor states? Does it really make sense to view all of reality as a multi-level dynamical system?
Anthropics. Maybe minds only arise when there’s (multi-level) cluster structure. Is that a satisfying explanation?
Processes. If there’s a process that produces something, and it just keeps going, it’ll produce lots of those things. Then there will be a cluster of “things produced by this process”. This doesn’t even have to derive from a preexisting cluster of processes operating in parallel, though it does derive from a cluster of the same process at different times. E.g. an artist might make a series of works that have a singular character, in some ways alike between themselves and distinct from all other art.
Stability. Stability is maybe the same as clustering across time. Maybe what we call “existence” or “reality” already implies some stability, so everything real necessarily already participates in some clusters.
Consequent clusters. If you have things in a cluster, they’ll create, develop into, or induce in the world things that are also clustered because their causes are clustered. E.g. the litany of human universals, which derive from the human cluster but seem additional to it.
This may be a confused question, but it seems like it’d be more satisfying to have a story where clusterness “goes up”, rather than just being “copied over” from other clusteredness.
Notation: L(X) means 10^X. Also written LX. So L1 means 10, L2 means a hundred, L6 means a million.
L.05 ~= 1.12
L.1 ~= 1.26 ~= 5⁄4
L.2 ~= 1.6
L.3 ~= 2
L.4 ~= 2.5
L.5 ~= 3.2
L.6 ~= 4
L.7 ~= 5
L.8 ~= 6.3
L.9 ~= 8
LX * LY = L(X+Y)
E.g. L(X+.3) = 2LX, and L(X+1) = 10LX
LX + LY ~= LX if X > Y, off by a factor of L(Y-X).
E.g. L2 + L0 ~= L2, i.e. 100 + 1 ~= 100, off by a factor of L-2 = 1⁄100.
L-X = 1 / LX
centimeter = L-2m
mm = L-3m
nm = L-9m, etc.
L.(0)ⁿ1 ~= 1.(0)ⁿ23
L is for logarithm (base 10) because we’re in logspace; maybe E would be better but I like L better for some reason, maybe because E already means expectation and e looks like the number e.
Consider the agent that wants to maximize amount of paperclips produced next week. Under the usual formalism, it has stable preferences. Under your proposed formalism, it has changing preferences—on Tuesday it no longer cares about amount of production on Monday. So it seems like this formalism loses information about stability. So I don’t see the point.
I think a counterexample to “you should not devote cognition to achieving things that have already happened” is being angry at someone who has revealed they’ve betrayed you, which might acause them to not have betrayed you.
x
This actually seems like a really, really good idea. Thanks!
x
It seems possibly quite important to this experience that you not have electronics or other “bed activities” that you can be doing (depending on your goal here)
x
Maybe something like “Don’t have anything within arms reach of you bed” so there’s no particular slope towards reading or electronics or whatnot, and if you do whole-heartedly start reading, you first had to get out of bed and grab the book.
x
Relevant study: “Smartphone Dependency & Consciousness” (Srivinas & Faiola 2014)
I find this wildly untrue, although I will try it.
x
Got it. Thank you for the suggestions; we’ll see!
x
Can’t you distract yourself with intellectual work?
In theory you might, but in practice you can’t. Distraction-avoidant behavior favors things that you can get into quickly, on the order of seconds—things like checking for Facebook notifications, or starting a game which has a very fast load time. Most intellectual work has a spinup, while you recreate mental context, before it provides rewards, so distraction-avoidant behavior doesn’t choose it.
Hmmm..I think personal experience tells me that distraction-avoidant behaviour will still choose intellectual work, as long as it is quicker than the alternative.
I might choose a game over writing a LW shortform but I will still choose a LW shortform over writing a novel.
x
There’s a second-level to this that I think the game would need to reach in order to work. One worry I’d have is that in competitive play, the response might not be a flourishing of interesting creative programming strategies, but “everyone just copies the best strategies and builds macros for them”.
The ideal version of this IMO would have some properties where the gameplay is varied enough that there are different higher-order programming things you’ll need to figure out on the fly.
That said, this exists, and might be kinda what you want:
https://screeps.com/
Have you played Factorio?
It would be a nice addition to games, if instead of having a point where they can get boring (after mastery has been achieved), instead having another level where tools (or tools for making tools) become gradually available to assist, and eventually replace, the player.
x
In my experience, the motion that seems to prevent mental crowding-out is intervening on the timing of my thinking: if I force myself to spend longer on a narrow question/topic/idea than is comfortable, eg with a timer, I’ll eventually run out of cached thoughts and spot things I would have otherwise missed.
I’ve found the “set a 5 minute timer” meme to not-quite-work because it takes me like 15 minutes just to get all my cached thoughts out, before I get to anything original. But yeah this basic idea here is a big part of my “actually thinking for real” toolkit.
__Levers error__.
Anna writes about bucket errors . Attempted summary: sometimes two facts are mentally tracked by only one variable; in that case, correctly updating the belief about one fact can also incorrectly update the belief about the other fact, so it is sometimes epistemic to flinch away from the truth of the first fact (until you can create more variables to track the facts separately).
There’s a conjugate error: two actions are bound together in one “lever”.
For example, I want to clean my messy room. But somehow it feels pointless / tiring, even before I’ve started. If I just started cleaning anyway, I’d get bogged down in some corner, trying to make a bunch of decisions about where exactly to put lots of futzy random objects, tiring myself out and leaving my room still annoyingly cluttered. It’s not that there’s a necessary connection between cleaning my room and futzing around inefficiently; it’s that the only lever I have right now that activates the “clean room” action also activates the “futz interminably” action.
What I want instead is to create a lever that activates “clean room” but not “futz”, e.g. by explicitly noting the possibility to just put futzy stuff in a box and not deal with it more. When I do that, I feel motivated to clean my messy room. I think this explains some “akrasia”.
The general pattern: I want to do X to acheive some goal, but the only way (that I know how right now) to do X is if I also do Y, and doing Y in this situation would be bad. Flinching away from action toward a goal is often about protecting your goals.
Just because someone is right about something or is competent at something, doesn’t mean you have to or ought to: do what they do; do what they tell you to do; do what’s good for them; do what they want you to do; do what other people think that person wants you to do; be included in their plans; be included in their confidence; believe what they believe; believe important what they believe important. If you don’t keep this distinction, then you might have a bucket error about “X is right about / good at Y” and “I have to Z” for some Z mentioned above, and Z might require a bunch of bad stuff, and so you will either not want to admit that X is good at Y, or else you will stop tracking in general when people are good at Y, or stop thinking Y matters (whereas by default you did think Y matters). Meritocracy (rule of the meritorious) isn’t the same thing as… meritognosis(?) (knowing who is meritorious). In general, -cracy is only good in some situations.
x
Hmm. I think I basically already did the first thing.
x
This is a good point. I’d do well to remember that repeated phrases stick in the mind: I’m currently on a bit of a reification spree where I’m giving names to a whole bunch of personal concepts (like moods, mental tools, etc) and since I would like these phrases to stick in the mind I think I shall repeat them.
x
PDFs support hyperlinks: they can define anchors at arbitrary points within themselves for a hyperlink, and they can hyperlink out. You can even specify a target page in a PDF which doesn’t define any usable anchors (which is dead useful and I use it all the time in references): eg https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/devnet/acrobat/pdfs/pdf_open_parameters.pdf#page=5
So I guess the issue here is having a tool which parses and edits PDFs to insert hyperlinks. That’s hard. Even if you solve the lookup problem by going through something like Semantic Scholar (the way I use https://ricon.dev/ on gwern.net for reverse citation search), PDFs aren’t made for this: when you look at a bit of text which is the name of a book or paper, it may not even be text, it may just be an image… Plus, your links will die. You shouldn’t trust any of those sites to stay up long-term at the exact URLs they are at.
About links dying; One way to solve this would be if we used peer-to-peer networks for documents like PDFs. I’m excited about dat protocol for things like this, though it will need more popularity of course. https://docs.datproject.org/docs/intro
It seems like our current URL system is quite poor in comparison.
Generally, apprenticeships should have planned obsolescence. A pattern I’ve seen in myself and others: A student takes a teacher. They’re submissive, in a certain sense—not giving up agency, or harming themselves, or following arbitrarily costly orders, or being overcredulous; but rather, a narrow purely cognition-allocating version of assuming a low-status stance: deferring to local directions of attention by the teacher, provisionally accepting some assumptions, taking a stance of trying to help the teacher with the teacher’s work. This is good because it enhances the bandwidth and depth of transmission of tacit knowledge from the teacher.
But, for many students, it shouldn’t be the endpoint of their development. At some point they should be questioning all assumptions, directing their attention and motivation on all levels, being the servant of their own plans. When this is delayed, e.g. the teacher or the student or something else is keeping the student within a fixed submissive role, the student is stunted, bitter, wasted, restless, jerked around, stagnant. In addition to lines of retreat from social roles, have lines of developmental fundamental change.
Say Alice is making some point to Bob, and Carol is listening and doesn’t like the point and tries to stop Alice from making the point to Bob. What might be going on? What is Carol trying to do, and why? She might think Alice is lying / disinforming—basing her arguments on false information or invalid arguments with false conclusions. But often that’s not what Carol reports; rather, even if Alice’s point is true and her arguments are valid reasoning from true information, and Carol could be expected to know that or at least not be so sure that’s not the case, Carol still wants to stop Alice from making the point. It’s a move in a “culture war”.
But what does that even mean? We might steelman Carol as implicitly working from an assumption like: maybe Alice’s literal, decoupled point is true; but no one’s a perfect decoupler, and so Bob might still make mistaken inferences from Alice’s true point, leading Bob to do bad things and spread disinformation. Another interpretation is more Simulacra: the claims have no external meaning, it’s a war for power over the narrative, and you want to say your side’s memes and block the other side’s memes.
Here’s a third interpretation, close to the Simulacra one, but with a clarification: maybe part of what’s going on, is that Bob does know how to check local consistency of his ideology, even though he lacks the integrative motive or skill to evaluate his whole position by modeling the world. So Bob is going to copy one or another ideology being presented. From within the reach of Bob’s mind, the conceptual vocabularies of opposed ideologies don’t have many shared meanings, even though on their own they are coherent and describe at least some of the world recognizably well. So there’s an exclusion principle: since Bob can’t assimilate the concepts of an ideology opposed to his into his vocabulary, unless given a large activation push, Bob will continue gaining fluency in his current vocabulary while the other vocabulary bounces off of him. However, talking to someone is enough activation energy to at least gain a little fluency, if only locally and temporarily, with their vocabulary. Carol may be worried that if there’s too many instances of various Alices successfully explaining points to Bob, then Bob will get enough fluency to be “over the hump” and will start snowballing more fluency in the opposing ideology, and eventually might switch loyalties.
Persian messenger: “Listen carefully, Leonidas. Xerxes conquers and controls everything he rests his eyes upon. He leads an army so massive it shakes the ground with its march, so vast it drinks the rivers dry. All the God-King Xerxes requires is this: a simple offering of earth and water. A token of Sparta’s submission to the will of Xerxes.”
[...]
Persian messenger: “Choose your next words carefully, Leonidas. They may be your last as king.”
[...]
Leonidas: “Earth and water… You’ll find plenty of both down there.” [indicates the well with his sword]
Persian messenger: “No man, Persian or Greek, no man threatens a messenger!”
Leonidas: “You bring the crowns and heads of conquered kings to my city’s steps! You insult my queen. You threaten my people with slavery and death! Oh, I’ve chosen my words carefully, Persian, while yours are lashed from your lips by the whip of your God-King. I’ll give you a final chance to live with justice: give up your fearful allegiance to your slavemaster Xerxes, do not speak his threats for him any more, and come live in Greece as a free man.”
Persian messenger: “This is blasphemy! This is madness!”
Leonidas: “Madness? THIS IS SPARTA!” [kicks the Persian messenger into the deep well]
Cluster structure of Thingspace.
But why does thingspace have clusters? Many objects are made by processes; if the same process makes many objects, those products will have many things in common.
Examples of clusters: Members of a species. Species in a clade. Species occupying similar niches (e.g., birds and flying insects have stuff in common not shared by other animals). Photocopies of something. Fragrances. Metals. Stars. Fascist states. Philosophers. Vector spaces. Etc.
Some categories seem to have certain features in common “only” because the category is selected for those features. E.g. “rock”. Is a mountain a rock? “A rock” is prototypically grippable-size. A rock the size of a person is a “big rock”, and a bigger rock is a boulder, etc. Much smaller, and it’s a pebble or a grain. I don’t think rocks, broadly construed, actually have a tendency to be grippable-size. We can still construe this as a genuine cluster, but it’s more relational, not purely intrinsic to the [objects, as completely external to the observer]. It’s not a trivial cluster; e.g. a prototypical rock can be knapped [by human hands], whereas a gigantic or tiny rock can’t be knapped [by human hands] in the same sense. But we can view it’s cluster-ness as partly not about empirical external [observer-independent] clustering. (There’s nothing postmodern or whatever about this, of course; just noting that it’s a cluster of relations with something else, and also the something-else happens to be the observer, so it’d be a mistake to think there’s a preexisting tendency of rocks to be several centimeters wide.) ISTM there’s some tension between this, and the background of talking about thingspace: we talk about thingspace from a place of aspiring to make maps, plus a belief that, when trying to make accurate maps, it’s good engineering to have ideas that act mentally in the same way that parts of the world act in the world. But in the case of “a rock” there’s a weird mixing of ideas: the concept of “a rock”, and the mental stuff involved in making there be such a thing (e.g. skill in knapping).
Why are human eyes clustered? Here are some answers:
Because they are generated by the same process: adaptation of the human genome-pool to the human ecological niche. That is, human eyes share most of their causal history, up until a few L4s—L6s of years ago. (L notation)
Because they play the role, in the human organism, of vision.
Because embryonic and physiological systems homeostatically create and preserve eyes in a narrow range along many dimensions, so they don’t just degenerate / mutate.
To be clear, the question isn’t “why are human eyes similar?”. The question is, “why is there a cluster; why are there many things that are {spherical, have a retina and cornea and circular iris and blood vessels, are pointed by muscles so the pupil-retina axes intersect on an object, are a couple cm wide, sit in bony sockets, resolve light into an image with a precision of about L-3.5 radians, have a ~circular fovea, etc.} and way fewer things with most but not ~all of these features?”.
So the question isn’t, “why do eyes have these features?”, but more like, in the space of things, why do almost all things that have most of these features have ~all of these features? (NB: the list I gave probably doesn’t pin down human eyes as distinct from, I think, maybe some other primate eyes, maybe some bird eyes, probably other eyes; but we could make such a list, e.g. by being more specific about the size, the proteins used, the distribution and types of photosensitive cells, etc.)
What about metal? We encounter metal that’s highly processed, optimized via homeostatic engineering to be this or that alloy with this or that ratio of such and such metals, heated and cooled and beaten to settle in a certain way. IIUC, native metals do have a cluster structure, but it’s pretty messy; gold usually comes with silver, copper comes with tin and arsenic and so on; how much depends on where you find it. But also there’s totally a cluster structure of metal: if you process it, you can separate out one kind from another, chemically react it to undo compounding such as rust, etc. There’s clusters, but they’re hidden. Why are they there? Why is there such a thing as iron or copper? Also why is there such a thing as metal? (The question isn’t, “why is metal shiny?” or “why is metal conductive?” or “why is metal hard?”, but rather, “why, among the elements, do those features correlate?”.)
Is there something in common between the answers to “why is there such a thing as metal?” and “why is there such a thing as the human eye?”?
Some possible answers:
Attractor states. The world is a multi-level dynamical system. Dynamical systems have attractor states. These attractor states are stereotyped, i.e. clustered. E.g. the elements exist because nuclei with certain numbers of protons and neutrons are the attractor states (or rather, attractor factors of the state space), and then nuclear structure implies features of elements. You don’t get long thin strands of nucleons, or nucleons spaced out by L-12m (atoms have nucleons that are ~L-14.5m apart); those aren’t stable, and aren’t attractors, or at least their basins of attraction are small. Why isn’t there a continuum of attractor states? Does it really make sense to view all of reality as a multi-level dynamical system?
Anthropics. Maybe minds only arise when there’s (multi-level) cluster structure. Is that a satisfying explanation?
Processes. If there’s a process that produces something, and it just keeps going, it’ll produce lots of those things. Then there will be a cluster of “things produced by this process”. This doesn’t even have to derive from a preexisting cluster of processes operating in parallel, though it does derive from a cluster of the same process at different times. E.g. an artist might make a series of works that have a singular character, in some ways alike between themselves and distinct from all other art.
Stability. Stability is maybe the same as clustering across time. Maybe what we call “existence” or “reality” already implies some stability, so everything real necessarily already participates in some clusters.
Consequent clusters. If you have things in a cluster, they’ll create, develop into, or induce in the world things that are also clustered because their causes are clustered. E.g. the litany of human universals, which derive from the human cluster but seem additional to it.
This may be a confused question, but it seems like it’d be more satisfying to have a story where clusterness “goes up”, rather than just being “copied over” from other clusteredness.
Notation: L(X) means 10^X. Also written LX. So L1 means 10, L2 means a hundred, L6 means a million.
L.05 ~= 1.12
L.1 ~= 1.26 ~= 5⁄4
L.2 ~= 1.6
L.3 ~= 2
L.4 ~= 2.5
L.5 ~= 3.2
L.6 ~= 4
L.7 ~= 5
L.8 ~= 6.3
L.9 ~= 8
LX * LY = L(X+Y)
E.g. L(X+.3) = 2LX, and L(X+1) = 10LX
LX + LY ~= LX if X > Y, off by a factor of L(Y-X).
E.g. L2 + L0 ~= L2, i.e. 100 + 1 ~= 100, off by a factor of L-2 = 1⁄100.
L-X = 1 / LX
centimeter = L-2m
mm = L-3m
nm = L-9m, etc.
L.(0)ⁿ1 ~= 1.(0)ⁿ23
L is for logarithm (base 10) because we’re in logspace; maybe E would be better but I like L better for some reason, maybe because E already means expectation and e looks like the number e.
x
Consider the agent that wants to maximize amount of paperclips produced next week. Under the usual formalism, it has stable preferences. Under your proposed formalism, it has changing preferences—on Tuesday it no longer cares about amount of production on Monday. So it seems like this formalism loses information about stability. So I don’t see the point.
x
I think a counterexample to “you should not devote cognition to achieving things that have already happened” is being angry at someone who has revealed they’ve betrayed you, which might acause them to not have betrayed you.