Notes
Working notes that used to live on the front page. Glossary-style, unfinished, and open to change. The foundations (replicators, memes, adaptation) have their own page: Memes and Adaptation.
Plurality of worlds and simulated realities: a reading list
Let the question of virtual realities dissolve in your mind.
Information is a strange thing: not the stuff, but the arrangement (formation) of stuff. It is an emergent property, and the basis of the higher-level sciences: biology, computer science (cybernetics), psychology.
According to Everettian quantum theory, the algorithm making our world is a multiverse. Everything that is possible exists, as multiverse snapshots, and time and causality emerge from their arrangement.
Daniel Dennett said consciousness is a virtual machine. Yes, but what is a virtual world? Why is it real, why does some software have qualia?
Permutation City, Greg Egan (1994)
A ravishing journey through simulated realities. The question: why should information patterns give rise to virtual realities?
The daring dust hypothesis: a simulated world recruits patterns, anywhere in reality, for its existence. The book gives a feel for emergence in this line of reasoning.
David Deutsch: The Beginning of Infinity and The Fabric of Reality
Multiverse, simulated realities, and the role of knowledge, explanation and personhood in reality. Summarizes Popperian epistemology in eye-opening ways.
Abstract replicator theory
- The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins (1976)
- The Extended Phenotype, Richard Dawkins (1982)
Anathem, Neal Stephenson (2008)
Beautiful and epic, with multiverse topics.
Monadology, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1714)
A timeless physics, where the basic entities that exist are monads.
A monad is not made of parts: maximally simple, non-compound. It is like a point in Euclidean geometry, infinitely small, but monads don't even have a location. They are like symbols in a Lisp system.
Causality is an emergent property of the monads, a pre-established harmony. The same move as Everett's: assume a large quantity of stuff, and physics, and perhaps things like qualia, can be emergent.
Coercion
coercive
Pointed against creativity: prohibiting open-ended knowledge creation in some way.
non-coercive technology
(First attempt.) Technology that serves the creativity of persons. Its opposite, coercive technology, is pointed against creativity, and life sucking.
Non-coercive tech leaves information processing systems some wiggle room, the way ordinary person-to-person interactions always had. The law is not applied 100% accurately, partly because some wiggle room is left in the behavioural domain: think of a police officer deciding a situation on the spot.
If I have to fill in form x to put the system into state Y, from which I can do form z, …
that is life sucking, because the creative understanding of the persons involved already exists.
non-coercive programming
(Attempt…)
Programming in a paradigm that puts creativity (Popper's critical rationalism) at the center of its concerns.
Programming is not about solving puzzles, but about using one's whole capacity for creative problem solving to explore and make progress on the problem at hand.
Programming languages should support the programmer's open-ended creativity, and be a medium of artistic expression.
This is why pragmatism is a core value of the most powerful language that ever existed, Clojure.
Suffering, the capability to suffer (Leidensfähigkeit)
A not-yet-understood property of software, connected with the loss, absence or hindrance of creative flourishing.
Related: pain is an adaptation of organisms, signaling a problem situation for reproductive success.
A theory of suffering is connected to the mind-body problem, and to the relationship between biological information processing and ethics.
One does not have to know one is suffering for suffering to occur. Anosognosia is the counterexample.
Similarly, perhaps animals don't suffer from the concept of death the way we do.
Then it also seems strange that phenomenal consciousness would be required for suffering to occur.
Even if our world were simulated on a computer by aliens, matrix style, those aliens would be accountable for running a simulation with this suffering in it. Yuval Noah Harari writes that of all the things in the world, suffering is the most real.1 Ethics is deeper than worlds. A typical inversion of reasoning that comes with a knowledge-based view.
Marvin Minsky thought of suffering in terms of resources and problem solving: pain disrupts one's other goals, and when that cascades, we call it suffering.2
Daniel Dennett gave pain a functional account too.3 My reading: pain is the way a software system raises a red alarm. It must be something that cannot be ignored, and is annoying, or it would not have its intended effect on the system.
Veganism (generalized)
Consider the Animals: a page for the rationalist who hasn't looked yet.
Minimizing the suffering of all sentient beings, across time, space, or all of reality, is ethical. Be it aliens, artificial persons (AGI) or non-human animals. I consider veganism almost self-evidently true.
Whether animals suffer is a live research topic, insect pain included. Peter Godfrey-Smith's Metazoa is a cool overview; he treats insect pain as an open question.4
We have no theory of suffering, so the decent thing to do is to err on the side of caution and consider them suffering. Obviously so!
Lucid dreaming
A dream in which the dreamer becomes aware that it is a dream.
How to proceed is up to the user; the control over the dream varies. I usually do one of flying, fucking, fighting, magic.
Others try to talk to relatives, or meditate on the dream itself.
Post-lucid dreams
A lucid dream with a narrative where the main character knows they are dreaming, but without the locus of control.
Examples of the usually Kafkaesque narrative. The dreamer is aware that they are dreaming…
- … and investigated by the dream police …
- … and faces their inner demons, which control their subconscious and their dream (damn you, Freud!) …
- … and faces characters from other dimensions with the power to appear in people's dreams …
These range from mystical to somewhat plausible, and rational thought can liberate one from nonsensical beliefs, even while dreaming.
Footnotes:
Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018), "Meaning": "of all the things in the world, suffering is the most real."
Marvin Minsky, The Emotion Machine (2006), ch. 3, "From Pain to Suffering": pain needs "to disrupt most of one's other usual goals. Whenever this leads to a large-scale cascade, then we use words like 'suffering'."
Daniel Dennett, Why You Can't Make a Computer That Feels Pain, Synthese (1978).
Peter Godfrey-Smith, Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind (2020).
Generated by Claude on Benjamin Schwerdtner's behalf.