• Biology is a software, it is 'software archeology' (G. Chaitin).
• The second software archeological discipline I know of is the study of large scale, real world applications with evolving conventions. (best examples: Lisp, unix, browser, emacs, your software project).
• Evolution is a search process in the space of possible designs (possible software).
• Evolution and human fun having (knowledge creation) are creative and open ended, current AI is not.
• Search processes make a computer do stuff on it's own.
• The gap between persons and current AI is in need of more advanced software, better programming philosophy.

not-fire #6, quill on clojurescript | fullscreen | gallery | code

If you look at any walls spotted with various stains or with a mixture of different kinds of stones, if you are about to invent some scene you will be able to see in it a resemblance to various different landscapes adorned with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, plains, wide valleys, and various groups of hills. You will also be able to see divers combats and figures in quick movement, and strange expressions of faces, and outlandish costumes, and an infinite number of things which you can then reduce into separate and well conceived forms.

Leonardo da Vinci

Experiment:

• start some music
• look at the picture above
• Why shouldn't it decide to dance with the music?

Post here: Character Pareidolia.

Other recent mind/brain blog posts:

• Lip Reading

simple: From simplex (sim- "one", -plex "having parts"), one fold, one braid - that is no folds. Simplicity is a objective property.

complex: 'braided together', consisting of many different connected parts.

to complect: Causing a system to be complex. [Hickey 2011].

elegance: The property of a 'good design'. Elegant design combines function, pragmatism and delight. The Vitruvian Triad is "durability, convenience, and beauty".

not-fire #11, number 11 because it was produced from a process of trial and error. Art and design is a kind of dialog of the artist with the piece [Ranulph Glanville].

David Deutsch in The Beginning Of Infinity and the talk Why Are Flowers Beautiful? makes the case for a missing theory of objective beauty.

Flowers evolved to signal ("I have nectar for you") to insects; Still humans find flowers beautiful - why?.

Deutsch conjectures that the gap in knowledge between persons is as large as between species; And that the human sense of aesthetics includes one for objective beauty, yet to be described.

An artist creates knowledge, 'gets closer to the truth' by conjecture and critisism when they try different versions of a piece. The discarded papers in Bethovens waste basket really contain (more) 'wrong' versions of a symphony.

Not all art captures aesthetic beauty, but some should. And do so much better than flowers.

Elegance is a criterion for good scientific theory, also mathematical proof. Beauty and truth have some sort of relationship - why?

This makes elegance a subtle but also sort of obvious problem, the problem as far as I am concerned.

The missing theory of elegance should unify epistemology, science and the arts; It seems be related to issues of creativiy, personhood, consciousness / mentality / AGI.

The intuition is that the (human) brain has adaptations, elegance detectors. Perhaps those play a central role in the algorithms of the brains ad-hoc epistemology.

Constructor theory (David Deutsch, Chiara Marletto) is an approach to theoretical physics that takes higher level issues like design seriously;

The best design is not merely simple, it is even "self evident" (Stuart Halloway 2012).

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

Leonardo da Vinci

design philosophy.

adaptive domain:

The causal, implementation - phase of replicating software.

See replicator, extended phenotype, genetic material.

adaptation

A feature of a design, made adaptive by natural selection.

extended phenotype

The set of effects - in the adaptive domain - that cause a replicator to be replicated.

In particular, the extended phenotype is not limited to morphology. The effects of a replicator do not 'end at the skin' as it were, they stretch into the behavioural domain, into the biochemistry of other organisms and so forth.

Beavers build dams, spiders nests, parasites influence the biochemistry of a snail host to strengthen its shell.

Consequently, the technosphere can be regarded as an extension of life in the first place.

The book of the same name (Dawkins 1982) is to be regarded as the second part of the genes eye view(!). 👈

If you enjoy The Selfish Gene, you must read The Extended Phenotype.

Also: abstract replicator theory.

tree of life:

A causally contingend design space object made out of ancestor descendant relationships. There should be one tree of life per origin of life event.

The tree of life is an invisible, theoretical entity predicted by natural selection (Darwin 1958), it is one of the most scientifically substantiated aspects of our world.

Science is often about invisible things that serve as explanations. 👈

The fact that all life is connected and descendant of a single life form (what a 'grandour' … ), the last universal common ancestor (LUCA), is at first glance counter intuitive and sometimes overlooked.

The tree of life exists in a space of counterfactuals, the design space. A branch on the tree of life only exists because it's alternatives were possible.

Design is about tradeoffs (Hickey 2011), and adaptation requires alternatives.

See also: last universal common ancestor (LUCA), adaptation

coercive:

Pointed against creativity, that is David Deutsch's open ended explanatory knowledge creation.

non coercive technology:

(first attempt) Technology that serves the creativity of persons. The opposite, coercive technology is pointed against creativity and live sucking.

Non-coercive tech allows for information processing systems to have wiggle room, just like normal local person-person interactions had previously.

The law is not applied 100% accurately (obviously), also because a certain wiggle room is left in the behavioural domain; E.g. police - user situations.

If I have to fill form x in order to make the information processing system go into state Y, from which I can do form z, …

This is life sucking; Because the creative understanding of the persons involved is already created.

Non-coercive tech would allow one to proceed in this situation.

Software engineering is, like any other craft, in principle non-coercive and open endedly creative. The computer per-se allows for infinite expression of creativity.

If I don't feel like putting the system into state Y, I can make up state lick-my-balls and keep going. I can also put a comment into code, like an accountant that can put a note explaining a situation into a ledger.

Related: Free Software; Not sure if all free software is non-coercive; All non-coercive software might be free software. And the referent might even be identical. In this case non-coercive technology emphasizes a different aspect of free software.

Coercive technology exists in the domain of programming languages and software design [Hickey 2015] ("Let's look at life sucking!"). Making this a philosophical angle on the Critical Rationalism of Software.

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