A curious random process that wants to explore and optimize all universes.
Mindey
Karma: 32
I am also planning to join, added it to my calendar. :) My other username here is Inyuki.
Hi, so the meetup is tomorrow. The location on the map is showing latitude=”40.4337827“, longitude=”-86.9248483”. Is this the exact place of meetup? Is there any classroom or place already designated for the meetup?
Curiosity is an urge to create the mental model of a phenomenon. Think of satisfying curiosity like doing science: when you do it ad-hominem, ask for the informed consent:
Is it okay to ask you __ for the purpose of X?
X = “verifying your position”, “making sure that what you are proposing is possible, because I can’t believe it yet”, “satisfying my desire for certainty about this phenomenon of which I am so uncertain as to have the wildest range of possibilities to consider” etc.
I’m looking forward to it, and to hopefully seeing some of those who couldn’t join previous time.
Believing what is true is not rationality, but planning what is best, based on what is true, is.
I was confused about it too, but understood that what is meant is, that the ‘half-silvered mirror rule’ is a rule that does two things at once, namely x: (x*1, x*i), so it’s a multi-valued operation.
To re-kindle the old-timers… Maybe re-opening the SL4 would help? I really liked its cleanliness, and the ability to participate directly via e-mail.
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Personally to each of us the value of content is a function of our goals. So, ideally, I would want to be able to have access to all comments, and simply have a smart filter to zero-in to those comments that matter to me. That would be a lot more universally useful and desirable to me than having something one-directionally useful, such as a machine learning model that simulates moderator based on a single standard or a limited set of values or limited set of extracted features.
So, one way to be universally useful would be to empower the user to compute the scores themselves based on arbitrary goals by providing all uninterpreted raw data to the user. However, since the community usually does have opinion, of what type of posts matter to be seen by a first-time viewer to give a sense of what the forum should feel like, it would make sense for the forum community to define some specific goal to be set as a default moderating filter.
What I would find interesting, is how these biological patterns compare and could apply to software systems. For example, take a look at the codons as curly braces. Can we look at the software development as an evolution of functions coded within the curly braces (some of them dormant, but some of them expressed (like proteins are), through being hosted on places like hosting providers (like ribosomes), or server processes, as in serverless computing).
While the behavior of society at the psychological and socio-economic level will have parallels to the aforementioned biological phenomena, however, it may be argued that in the long term, the future of the evolution and behaviors is going to be decided by the evolution of functions as on-line services, that create the foundation for social behaviors, and how they evolve may be even more interesting to consider than just the psychological and socio-economic decisions.
Safety is assurance of pursuit of some goals (Y) - some conditions. So, one thing that’s unlikely to have a paradigmatic shift, is search for actions to satisfy conditions:
1. Past: dots, line, regression
2. Present: objects, hyperplane, deep learning
3. Future: ?, ?, ?
Both 1. and 2. are just a way to satisfy conditions, that is, solve equation F(X)=Y (equation solving as processes (X) to model world (F), to satisfy conditions (Y)). The equation model had not changed for ages, and is so fundamental, that I would tend to assume, that world’s processes X will continue to parametrize world F by being part of it, to satisfy conditions Y, no matter what the 3. is.
I wouldn’t expect the fundamental goals (specific conditions Y) to change either: the world’s entropy (F) (which is how world manifests, hence world’s entropy is the world) trains learning processes such as life (which is fundamentally mutating replicators) to pursue goal Y which may be formulated as just information about the entropy to counteract it (create world’s F model F’ to minimize change = reach stability).
Islands of stability exist for chemical elements, for life forms (mosquitoes are an island of stability among processes in existence, although they don’t have to be very intelligent to persist), and I believe they exist for the artificial life (AI/ML systems) too, just not clear where exactly these islands of stability will be.
Where the risk to civilization may lie, is in the emergence of processes evolving independently of the existing civilization (see symbiosis in coordination problem in biological systems), because of incorrect payoffs, making useful services parasitize our infrastructures (e.g., run more efficient economically self-sustaining processes on computers).
Random or complex processes are curiosities. Infinitely complex cellular automata are infinitely curious to explore all possible worlds. Entropy of the world itself may be. As described on my monologue here, agents are fundamentally entities capable of volition, cognition, action. Therefore, they are instances of F(X)=Y, where volition is Y, cognition is perception of world F, and action is the process X that parametrizes the world seeking to satisfy the equation.
If X is within F, we have embedded processes. So, yeah agency may be an illusion of processes (curiosities) seeking to satisfy (optimize for) various conditions, and it is already be happening, as the processes that are trying to satisfy conditions are emerging on the world-wide web, not just within our brains.
Certainly true, yet, just because this is how almost every field of research works, doesn’t mean that it is how they should work, and I like shminux’s point.
Rationality has no axioms, just heuristics and rules for different environments. In other words, rationality is a solution to a problem (optimality of thinking and deciding) to reason within a domain, but because of the diversity of domains, it is not axiomatizable to a single specific set of axioms. I suppose best one can do given arbitrary domain, is to say: maybe try exploring.
It’s great that we already had these ideas before. The “short-form” would definitely be of interest to some. In addition, it doesn’t have to necessarily be ephemeral. For example, on the Halfbakery mentioned above, posts (even if short) continue to function (e.g., I can comment on something from the last century), even if it was just a short post.
Thanks to Moe and Suji indeed. I’m putting the link to Chinese description to the top of the page.
Are you reading Halfbakery, Eliezer? A similar idea has been shared rather recently there, though, I posted something along these lines 4 years ago (4 months before the post on steemit) over here and here. Would be quite curious to engage in this, due to potential benefits to health and cryonics, as described in this video.
However, information-theoretic groundings only talk about probability, not about “goals” or “agents” or anything utility-like. Here, we’ve transformed expected utility maximization into something explicitly information-theoretic and conceptually natural.
This interpretation of model fitting formalizes goal pursuit, and looks well constructed. I like this as a step forward in addressing my concern about terminology of AI researchers.
I imagine that negentropy could serve as a universal “resource”, replacing the “dollars” typically used as a measuring stick in coherence theorems.
I like to say that “entropy has trained mutating replicators to pursue goal called ‘information about the entropy to counteract it’. This ‘information’ is us. It is the world model , which happened to be the most helpful in solving our equation for actions , maximizing our ability to counteract entropy.” How would we say that in this formalism?
Laws of physics are not perfect model of the world, thus we do science and research, trying to make ourselves into a better model of it. However, neither we nor AIs choose the model to minimize the length of input for—ultimately, it is the world that induces its model into each of us (including computers) and optimizes it, not the other way around. There’s that irreducible computational complexity in this world, which we continue to explore, iteratively improving our approximations, which we call our model—laws of physics. If someone makes a paperclip maximizer, it will die because of world’s entropy, unless it maximizes for its survival (i.e., instead of making paperclips, it makes various copies of itself and all the non-paperclip components needed for its copies, searching for better ones at survival).
Still, ASI is just equation model F(X)=Y on steroids, where F is given by the world (physics), X is a search process (natural Monte-Carlo, or biological or artificial world parameter search), and Y is goal (or rewards).
To control ASI, you control the “Y” (right side) of equation. Currently, humanity has formalized its goals as expected behaviors codified in legal systems and organizational codes of ethics, conduct, behavior, etc. This is not ideal, because those codes are mostly buggy.
Ideally, the “Y” would be dynamically inferred and corrected, based on each individual’s self-reflections, evolving understanding about who they really are, because the deeper you look, the more you realize, how each of us is a mystery.
I like the term “Y-combinator”, as this reflects what we have to do—combine our definitions of “Y” into the goals that AIs are going to pursue. We need to invent new, better “Y-combination” systems that reward AI systems being trained.
I had certailny been influenced by my father, who, after my parents divorced, told me to have my own goal of life. However, I wanted to have a truly good one, not an evil one. It caused me to search for precise definition of “universal good,”—a precise criterion for deciding, what action is universally good and what action is not.
I know Bayes theorem now, such a wonder! But when I was a kid, I had not such a romantic and beautiful event as Elizer had, so I came up with a different criterion. The best is to let the world exist, and the worst is to destroy the world. The “world” here refers to the universe as a whole, as well as the universe as every no matter how small its part.
Ever since I came up with this criterion, this thought didn’t seem to lose its importance. In fact, I made this idealistic motto “let everything exist,” which is the extropic side of this criterion.
I would say, it helped me to overcome great difficulties of life. I guess, I’m not alone, in fact, one of the posters here, Wei Dai, has a mailing list about the very idea that “that all possible universes exist” ( http://www.weidai.com/everything.html ).