… I think I may have underestimated an inferential gap here.
I’m pointing to the same thing as Yudkowsky’s engines of cognition essay: roughly speaking, the only way two things in the physical world have mutual information is if there’s some kind of causal connection between them. In that essay, Yudkowsky is talking about this in the context of forming accurate beliefs. The main takeaway is that, in order for my beliefs to accurately reflect the territory, there has to be some sort of causal connection between the territory and my beliefs.
One particularly good example from Yudkowsky:
It happens, in miniature, every time you look down at your shoes to see if your shoelaces are untied. Photons arrive from the Sun, bounce off your shoelaces, strike your retina, are transduced into neural firing frequences, and are reconstructed by your visual cortex into an activation pattern that is strongly correlated with the current shape of your shoelaces. To gain new information about the territory, you have to interact with the territory. There has to be some real, physical process whereby your brain state ends up correlated to the state of the environment.
That’s a cartographic process in action. It makes the map (belief regarding whether my shoe is tied) correlate with the territory (physical shoelace).
I’m trying to take that same idea, and formalize it in a way that makes sense without any human and without any “beliefs”—just one physical system which models another physical system. The idea is that, in order for one physical system to model another (i.e. in order for the results of queries on one system to predict the results of queries on another) there has to be some kind of causal connection between the two systems. That connection is what I’m calling a cartographic process—regardless of whether there’s any human involved, or any intention.
… I think I may have underestimated an inferential gap here.
I’m pointing to the same thing as Yudkowsky’s engines of cognition essay: roughly speaking, the only way two things in the physical world have mutual information is if there’s some kind of causal connection between them. In that essay, Yudkowsky is talking about this in the context of forming accurate beliefs. The main takeaway is that, in order for my beliefs to accurately reflect the territory, there has to be some sort of causal connection between the territory and my beliefs.
One particularly good example from Yudkowsky:
That’s a cartographic process in action. It makes the map (belief regarding whether my shoe is tied) correlate with the territory (physical shoelace).
I’m trying to take that same idea, and formalize it in a way that makes sense without any human and without any “beliefs”—just one physical system which models another physical system. The idea is that, in order for one physical system to model another (i.e. in order for the results of queries on one system to predict the results of queries on another) there has to be some kind of causal connection between the two systems. That connection is what I’m calling a cartographic process—regardless of whether there’s any human involved, or any intention.