Misc. Conjectures Re: AGI and Evolution
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With an account, you can revise, criticize, and comment on ideas.Claim: It is useful (if not crucial) to distinguish between two notions of novelty: inferential and non-inferential.
Knowledge that is inferentially novel may never have been seen before, but was already implicit in existing knowledge; it results from application and composition of existing knowledge (e.g. the running of programs). What is novel in this way can be instantiated without any external epistemic (knowledge-related) influence. A program needs infrastructure to allow its computation to occur; it does not need another program, in an epistemic sense: If there's a dependency, we should consider the two to be part of the same "epistemic system." Let's say the dependent target has no "implication space" until its needed source is causally linked to it. The source may have its own implication space. Once "joined," a new implication space is defined.
Inferentially novel output (the instantiation of knowledge in an implication space) is all that current computer software (and all AI) is capable of. These systems "create" knowledge only in this sense.
How much overlap is there between the concept of inferential novelty and reach, if any?
Fun question. Say the reach of a program is the set of all problems it can solve or help solve (whether anyone knows, or whether the problems exist yet). All of that program's possible outputs together comprise the implication space -- it sounds like "codomain" is actual term. The instantiation of each item in the codomain is an occurrence of my "inferential novelty". The codomain is implicit in a program when it is created, but not all of that output will help solve problems. The program's reach is the subset that does.
Maybe this definition accommodates both the multiversal and atemporal aspects of reality: a program's reach is the set of its outputs that solve problems in any universe (past, present or adjacent).
But this depends on what a "problem" is; any output will be the solution to some problem, somewhere, so all programs would have unlimited reach.
So reach should only ever be invoked with respect to existing knowledge? So a program's reach is the intersection of its codomain and the solutions to known problems.