The question is how to identify particular bubbles of seekingness in the universe. How can you tell which part of the universe will respond to changes in other parts’ shape by reshaping them, and how? How do you know when a cell wants something, in the sense that if the process of getting the thing is interfered with, it will generate physical motions that end up compensating for the interference. How do you know if it wants the thing, if it responds differently to different sizes of interference? Can we identify conflict between two bubbles of seekingness? etc.
The key question is how to identify when a physical has a preference for one thing over another. The hope is that, if we find a sufficiently coherent causal mechanism description that specifies what physical systems qualify as
For what it’s worth, I think you’re on a really good track here, and I’m very excited about views that have the one you’re starting with. I’d invite browsing my account and links, as this is something I talk about often, from various perspectives, though mostly I defer to others for getting the math right.
Speaking of getting the math right: read Discovering Agents (or browse related papers), it’s a really great paper. it’s not an easy first paper to read, but I’m a big believer in out-of-order learning and jumping way ahead of your current level to get a sense of what’s out there. Also check out the related paper Interpreting systems as solving POMDPs (or browse ) related papers.
If you’re also new to scholarship in general, I’d also suggest checking out some stuff on how to do scholarship efficiently as well. a friend and I trimmed an old paper I like on how to read papers efficiently, and posted it to LW the other day. You can also find more related stuff from the tags on that post. (I reference that article myself occasionally and find myself surprised by how dense it is as a checklist of visits if I’m trying to properly understand a paper.)
I’ll read the papers once I get on the computer—don’t worry, I may have not finished uni, but I always loved reading papers over a cup of tea.
I’m kind of writing about this subject right now, so maybe there you can find something that interests you.
How do I know what parts of the universe will respond to what changes?
To me, at least, this seems like a mostly false question, for you to have true knowledge of that, you’d need to become the Universe itself.
If you don’t care about true knowledge just good % chances, then you do it with heuristic.
First you come up with composites that are somewhat self similar, but nothing is exactly alike in the Universe, except the Universe itself. Then you create a heuristic for predicting those composites and you use it, as long as the composite is similar enough to the original composite that the heuristic was based on. Of course, heuristics work differently in different environments, but often there are only a few environments even relevant for each composite, for if you take a fish out of water, it will die—now you may want a heuristic for an alive fish in the air, but I see it as much more useful to recompile the fish into catch at that point.
This of course applies on any level of composition, from specific specimens of fish, to ones from a specific family, to a single species, then to all fish, then to all living organisms, with as many steps in between these listed as you want. How do we discriminate between which composite level we ought to work with? Pure intuition and experiment, once you do it with logic, it all becomes useless, because logic will attempt to compression everything, even those things which have more utility being uncompressed.
I’ll get to the rest of your comment on PC, my fingers hurt. Typing on this new big phone is so hard lol.
The question is how to identify particular bubbles of seekingness in the universe. How can you tell which part of the universe will respond to changes in other parts’ shape by reshaping them, and how? How do you know when a cell wants something, in the sense that if the process of getting the thing is interfered with, it will generate physical motions that end up compensating for the interference. How do you know if it wants the thing, if it responds differently to different sizes of interference? Can we identify conflict between two bubbles of seekingness? etc.
The key question is how to identify when a physical has a preference for one thing over another. The hope is that, if we find a sufficiently coherent causal mechanism description that specifies what physical systems qualify as
For what it’s worth, I think you’re on a really good track here, and I’m very excited about views that have the one you’re starting with. I’d invite browsing my account and links, as this is something I talk about often, from various perspectives, though mostly I defer to others for getting the math right.
Speaking of getting the math right: read Discovering Agents (or browse related papers), it’s a really great paper. it’s not an easy first paper to read, but I’m a big believer in out-of-order learning and jumping way ahead of your current level to get a sense of what’s out there. Also check out the related paper Interpreting systems as solving POMDPs (or browse ) related papers.
If you’re also new to scholarship in general, I’d also suggest checking out some stuff on how to do scholarship efficiently as well. a friend and I trimmed an old paper I like on how to read papers efficiently, and posted it to LW the other day. You can also find more related stuff from the tags on that post. (I reference that article myself occasionally and find myself surprised by how dense it is as a checklist of visits if I’m trying to properly understand a paper.)
I’ll read the papers once I get on the computer—don’t worry, I may have not finished uni, but I always loved reading papers over a cup of tea.
I’m kind of writing about this subject right now, so maybe there you can find something that interests you.
How do I know what parts of the universe will respond to what changes? To me, at least, this seems like a mostly false question, for you to have true knowledge of that, you’d need to become the Universe itself. If you don’t care about true knowledge just good % chances, then you do it with heuristic. First you come up with composites that are somewhat self similar, but nothing is exactly alike in the Universe, except the Universe itself. Then you create a heuristic for predicting those composites and you use it, as long as the composite is similar enough to the original composite that the heuristic was based on. Of course, heuristics work differently in different environments, but often there are only a few environments even relevant for each composite, for if you take a fish out of water, it will die—now you may want a heuristic for an alive fish in the air, but I see it as much more useful to recompile the fish into catch at that point.
This of course applies on any level of composition, from specific specimens of fish, to ones from a specific family, to a single species, then to all fish, then to all living organisms, with as many steps in between these listed as you want. How do we discriminate between which composite level we ought to work with? Pure intuition and experiment, once you do it with logic, it all becomes useless, because logic will attempt to compression everything, even those things which have more utility being uncompressed.
I’ll get to the rest of your comment on PC, my fingers hurt. Typing on this new big phone is so hard lol.