3 ms·

I've watched the second video and it still makes no sense to me. "if you have an organism that sees reality as it is, competing with an organism that sees none

by Udik 6y ago

I've watched the second video and it still makes no sense to me. "if you have an organism that sees reality as it is, competing with an organism that sees none of reality but is just tuned to what's called the fitness in the environment" The fitness in the environment? As I understand it, fitness is a property of the individuals, not of the environment. It's defined ex post as the reproductive success of an individual. What does being "tuned to fitness" mean? I imagine (but can only guess) it means something like "being served a pre-digested version of reality that maximises some signal-to-noise ratio". But that means that someone else is doing the job of actually parsing the relevant information in the environment before feeding it to an organism. The second issue I have is with the concept of "reality". Is there even such a thing? Real is what, in some sense, reflects useful properties of the environment- and it's still an approximation. Is the steak real? Or are its proteins real? Or the atoms of which it is composed? Or the chemical bounds between them? Or the quarks? Or where it came from? Or its colour? Or its relation with our digestive system? In the video he makes the example of a file: is it "real" that the file is an icon sitting in the middle of the screen? Well, for some uses it is. For others it's sitting somewhere in the filesystem. For other uses, it's a series of non-contiguous blocks. For others still, it's magnetic fields on a disc surface. For others, it's an abstract entity that can be printed on a sheet of paper or sent via email or encrypted. All these things are real, yet none really captures the ground truth of the thing, which is possibly unknowable.

patcon 6y ago
Hm. Ok, these are good questions. I did biochemistry, where we kinda talked about "fitness" a lot -- I haven't unrolled it in awhile, so you've got me thinking. Let me try... Fitness is a property of the relationship between an actor and the environment -- the human and the gazelle in the savanna. It's not a property of the gazelle or the human or the savanna. It's purely relational. One actor seeing fitness is it having (and seeing) connections with others that allow its structure to "persist". Persist to the next generation in biological evolution, and to the next tick of the simulation for thermodynamic evolution. But yeah, it's all about volatile structures persisting. So for the sake of this thought experiment -- you could imagine a god-view that sees "reality" to some degree of resolution. For the sake of capping the distance down the stack our minds wander, your current understanding of the world could be the god view. From the point of view of human actors 1000 years ago, it essentially is. The point is, you know of more than can be perceived by the actors under observation (technically, the gazelle, the human, and even the geology of the savanna are structural "actors" undergoing [thermodynamic] evolution, but it's easier to just focus on the human). As I understand, the idea that fitness outcompetes reality is that the view of the fitness relationship will always drive out the view of "reality", which is more complex. That the complexity of reality is unfavored and unstable to perceive. That when an actor unwraps the "next layer" of the god-view, it will entropically always fail to resemble the previously perceivable appearance, all the way down. And we can dig deeper and learn more truth, but it's perhaps not entropically favoured to try to fully operate according to that truth (e.g., a rationalist society without reductive belief systems). The white lie will be favoured. Those who distort will always be aligning themselves more with the universe than those who strive for truth. And to the extent truth seems to have won, it's perhaps only because some equilibrating distortion was balancing out the equations of the larger system. Sorry that I'm giving this sort of interpretation. I'm certainly taking leaps beyond the source material here, and I recognize it might be very frustrating how I'm speaking about this if you're a certain sort of respectful concrete thinker. That's understandable, but I suppose not where I'm at right now -- untangling the threads I'm pulling on feels a bit overwhelming to me as well. So yes, you'd be fair to disregard if how I'm able to deliver right now doesn't fit your own models of the universe :) At risk of sharing more than you care to dive into, I suspect the topics in these articles are informing how I process this: https://nautil.us/issue/9/time/life-is-a-braid-in-spacetime https://nautil.us/issue/9/time/life-is-a-braid-in-spacetime https://knowm.org/thermodynamic-computing/ https://knowm.org/thermodynamic-computing/ Anyhow, be well! Sorry if I failed to answer satisfactorily, but I genuinely appreciated your great prompts!

by Udik 6y ago

patcon 6y ago

Hm. Ok, these are good questions. I did biochemistry, where we kinda talked about "fitness" a lot -- I haven't unrolled it in awhile, so you've got me thinking. Let me try... Fitness is a property of the relationship between an actor and the environment -- the human and the gazelle in the savanna. It's not a property of the gazelle or the human or the savanna. It's purely relational. One actor seeing fitness is it having (and seeing) connections with others that allow its structure to "persist". Persist to the next generation in biological evolution, and to the next tick of the simulation for thermodynamic evolution. But yeah, it's all about volatile structures persisting. So for the sake of this thought experiment -- you could imagine a god-view that sees "reality" to some degree of resolution. For the sake of capping the distance down the stack our minds wander, your current understanding of the world could be the god view. From the point of view of human actors 1000 years ago, it essentially is. The point is, you know of more than can be perceived by the actors under observation (technically, the gazelle, the human, and even the geology of the savanna are structural "actors" undergoing [thermodynamic] evolution, but it's easier to just focus on the human). As I understand, the idea that fitness outcompetes reality is that the view of the fitness relationship will always drive out the view of "reality", which is more complex. That the complexity of reality is unfavored and unstable to perceive. That when an actor unwraps the "next layer" of the god-view, it will entropically always fail to resemble the previously perceivable appearance, all the way down. And we can dig deeper and learn more truth, but it's perhaps not entropically favoured to try to fully operate according to that truth (e.g., a rationalist society without reductive belief systems). The white lie will be favoured. Those who distort will always be aligning themselves more with the universe than those who strive for truth. And to the extent truth seems to have won, it's perhaps only because some equilibrating distortion was balancing out the equations of the larger system. Sorry that I'm giving this sort of interpretation. I'm certainly taking leaps beyond the source material here, and I recognize it might be very frustrating how I'm speaking about this if you're a certain sort of respectful concrete thinker. That's understandable, but I suppose not where I'm at right now -- untangling the threads I'm pulling on feels a bit overwhelming to me as well. So yes, you'd be fair to disregard if how I'm able to deliver right now doesn't fit your own models of the universe :) At risk of sharing more than you care to dive into, I suspect the topics in these articles are informing how I process this: https://nautil.us/issue/9/time/life-is-a-braid-in-spacetime https://nautil.us/issue/9/time/life-is-a-braid-in-spacetime https://knowm.org/thermodynamic-computing/ https://knowm.org/thermodynamic-computing/ Anyhow, be well! Sorry if I failed to answer satisfactorily, but I genuinely appreciated your great prompts!