English: I’ve seen folks say humanity’s quick growth may have broken the link to evolution’s primary objective, often referenced as total inclusive fitness. I don’t think we have broken that connection.
Let process temporarily refer to any energy-consuming structured chemical or physical reaction that consumes fuel—this could also be termed “computation” or in many but not all cases “life”.
let “defensibility” refer to a metric of how well a process maintains itself against interference forall shapes of interfering still matter or moving process.
for all matter, Evolution-of-matter’s-process optimizes for process-defensibility-per-unit-fuel.
genetic evolution is a subset of self-preserving processes. total inclusive fitness is intended to measure gene-level genetic selfishness in terms of offspring, but I would argue that discrete offspring are the wrong unit: genetic evolution’s noise-defense-aka-mutation-resistance is built by the preservation of genes that increase durability*efficiency.
therefore, because improving the self-selection self-process by use of contraception allows humans to guide their own reproduction, contraception is not automatically a divergence from incentive—and to the degree it is, it’s selected against.
therefore, improving the self-selection process by simply not dying allows humans to defend their own structure much more accurately than traditional reproduction—though it’s not as defensible as strategies that replicate as hard as they can, a full integrated being can often be quite defensible over the medium term, and hopefully with life extension, over the long term as well.
as further evidence, humans appear to have a significant desire to remember. This is well-described by this framework as well! mental process also qualifies as an evolution-of-matter’s-process, and thought patterns seek some set of accepted state transitions so that the after-transition structure qualifies as “self”.
this also relates well to concerns folks on lesswrong have expressed regarding self-modification: all forms of process self-maintenance have some degree of self-update, and various energetic processes control their rate of self-update.
it relates to EY’s view that a safe hard-ASI should be asked to pull the ladder up behind itself: to ensure its own process-durability. In a post recently he used this as an example of the kind of defense a State-like singleton should have. however, I’d propose that maintaining its self-process should be done in a way that ends all vulnerability of any physical process.
If any of my word bindings are unclear, let me know and I’ll add a definition that attempts to link the concepts to each other better.
Misc notes: I’m not the best english-solver, folks who’ve studied math proofs are likely much better than I am at this semiformal syntax, and if you’ve noticed an error, it’s probably real, post it—doing logic involves heavy backtracking. I’m not as educated in these fields of math as I’d like to be. I have in my lw shortform an index of youtube sources that discuss various topics including these, I’ve only skimmed for the most part, but in particular I’d recommend anyone serious about ai safety catch up on the work discussed at the simons institute.
I wrote a post that is partially inspired by this one: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GzGJSgoN5iNqNFr9q/we-haven-t-quit-evolution-short—copy and pasted into this comment: