Search Ideas

Non-specific criticisms, those not taking into account the content of their target, are always "analogue" (or quantitative as opposed to qualitative) in the sense of being based on a variable whose quantity changes in a medium distinct from that hosting the knowledge it is serving as criticism for. (E.g. capital allocation in an economy; number of instances of a replicator.)

Specific criticisms, those taking into account the content of their target, are always discrete and absolute because they identify a contradiction. (E.g. criticisms of a scientific theory.)

Why aren't mutations made to DNA a form of conjecture? I think of conjecture as being a pretty general term -- isn't all knowledge conjectural, ours or otherwise? Maybe semantics. Agreed that criticism is a subset of selection: selection that is a function of the knowledge in the target, perhaps? Whereas differential replication is how selection proceeds without referring to the specific knowledge in the target..? [Overall idea stands despite my concession above]

Maybe natural selection logically does not require death, but when we introduce a scarcity of resources, isn't death an inevitable byproduct? Eventually, the best replicating will be those which take the resources from others? If no death, then number of entities increases without bound. So any real system will have it, or will stop functioning when the limit is reached.

It's sort of like: the "this is replicating less" criticism has no actual weight to it unless there is a point beneath which any less fecundity = bye-bye.
**If things with arbitrarily low fecundity are left intact forever, how is differential replication a criticism?**

No, my thinking here is that any given set of knowledge can only do inference: apply what transformations it has to whatever data it has, and that's it. It can't output things that are not already implicit in it, so cannot grow, in any epistemic sense. Even if running some kind of evolutionary procedure. An external source of novelty is required for growth, with respect to any given set of knowledge.

Unassailable argument for property rights?:
Does my body belong to anyone? Who? What about the knowledge in its brain, or the computations that it's carrying out? Or its sense of self? Ownership does not apply to these things? Anyone has as much of a claim to them as me? If not, and I do own these things, then ownership is indeed an unrefuted theory with respect to them. Then, why are these things a different case from other objects and processes, such as those in the room around me, and onward (per explanations, as the case may be)?

I wonder if there is any significance to the "distance" the laws of physics are from us, in the sense of emergence. Each quantum application of the laws of physics (conceived as discrete steps) is so far down, but maybe it need not be so. Maybe there are people in other laws of physics, where the laws are much closer at hand. Do the laws need to have a certain minimum range of emergence for personhood to be possible..? Couldn't people like us exist in a universe where fundamental physics is no more complex than the operation of our minds, or is the "breathing room" we have here necessary?

Natural selection requires differential replication, not death. (Death is just an extreme form of differential replication, when compared to any allele that does replicate.)

Natural selection requires differential replication, not death. (Death is just an form of extreme differential replication, when compared to any allele that does replicate.)

Did you mean "Any given set of knowledge cannot grow itself inferentially"?

I think it is a mistake to say or imply that variation and selection IS conjecture and criticism. At best C&C is the subset of V&S that occurs in minds. The biosphere doesn’t actually conjecture anything.

Any relation in all this to entanglement and decoherence? In the picture laid out here, the non-specificity of feedback seems to be preventing decoherence of a sort...

I.e., information caused (if only partially) by some source can be "content independent" w.r.t. that source in a similar sense to how information itself is substrate independent.

An example of this is prices in a market: a price communicates information about (or caused by) knowledge in a system while being agnostic to the content; the specifics and interactions of the target knowledge are abstracted away, so any changes made by sources receiving the price information remain blind to the target, and therefore can remain a source of novelty to them (the prices themselves are not a source of novelty; they are a means of retaining a causal relationship while preventing the “collapse” of two epistemic systems into one)...

No because 1) there’s always a finite amount of deeply nested criticisms, and 2) the discussion graph is acyclic.

should_adopt? and pending_criticisms are implemented in terms of each other. Doesn’t that cause an infinite regress?

Recursive Epistemology

Veritula implements a recursive epistemology. For a criticism to be pending, it can’t have any pending criticisms itself, and so on, in a deeply nested fashion.

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def should_adopt? idea
  pending_criticisms(idea).none?
end

def pending_criticisms idea
  criticisms(idea).filter { |c| should_adopt?(c) }
end

def criticisms idea
  children(idea).filter(&:criticism?)
end

This approach is different from non-recursive epistemologies, which handle criticisms differently. For example, they might not consider deeply nested criticisms when determining whether an idea is currently criticized.

Conjecture: a source of variation with its own knowledge can remain blind and external to its target while nonetheless receiving feedback from the target, so long as the feedback is non-specific to any content in the target.

Creativity (or “creation” or non-inferential novelty) is occurring in a system iff the system is being altered by a second system that is epistemically separated from it (its changes are nonspecific to the information content of the first system).

But if the source of variation only makes changes that are blind–that do not depend on the specific content of the target–then its implication space remains separate from the target’s. It is changing the target's implication space (its set of counterfactuals...), serving as a source of novelty for the target, while its own implication space is unchanged.

If changes are not blind, the changer is changing based on the content of the knowledge in the target, in which case the two have a joint implication space: their possible states are all implicit in the system, and there are no states that are novel with respect to either of them; creativity is not possible. It’s like two differently charged conductors coming into contact and neutralizing the electric field between them. An "epistemic capacitor."

If changes are not blind, the changer is changing based on the content of the knowledge in the target, in which case the two have a joint implication space: their possible states are all implicit in the system, and there are no states that are novel with respect to either of them; creativity is not possible. It’s like two differently charged conductors coming into contact and neutralizing the electric field between them.

That these external sources of variation in the case of DNA do not themselves contain knowledge is happenstance, another special case. A source of variation acting on a given set of knowledge can be knowledge-bearing while still being epistemically external to the target (making only blind changes to it), so long as the variations do not depend on the specific content of the knowledge in the target. So: set A is altered by set B, each are knowledge-containing, but knowledge in B does not pertain to A.

For the changes made by a source of variation to be dependent on the content of any knowledge in the target, the source would have to contain knowledge itself. (The DNA mutation sources do not.) Blind changes are dependent on the medium in which information is contained, like an A versus a G in a strand of DNA (assuming these are information media). But the change made to the A or G by the cosmic ray is independent of the information they are hosting, if any. Any changes by the ray are dependent on the physical/chemical structure of the target, the substrate. Information is substrate independent. It is not the information stored in the A or G that is determining what changes are made to them.

The externally-derived sources of variation/novelty in the case of DNA (cosmic rays and failures in copying due to chemistry) are blind: they do not interact (epistemically) with the knowledge of the system. That is, their changes are independent of the knowledge in the system. This is what makes these sources epistemically separate.