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

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

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

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 criticism when they try different versions of a piece. The discarded papers in Beethovan's 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.

The causal, implementation - phase of replicating software.

See replicator, extended phenotype, genetic material.

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

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, some parasite influence the biochemistry of a snail host to strenghten its shell.

The Extended Phenotype (Dawkins 1982) is as the second part of the genes eye view(!). 👈 Yet strangely underrated.

Thechnology is not an extended phenotype, since there are no genes selecting for variations of technology. It is the capacity for technology, 'runtime dynamism', a Baldwin effect, that is the phenotype.

Also: abstract replicator theory.

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 1959), it is one of the most scientifically substantiated aspects of our world.

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

The fact that all life is connected and descendant of a single life form (what a 'grandeur' … ), 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.

This is because the mechanism of evolution, natural selection, operates on the selection among alternatives.

• adaptation requires alternatives,
• Design is always about tradeoffs (Hickey 2011),
• Likewise a theory only exists because of it's alternatives

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

'Information with causal power'.

Knowledge of a genome: A software program that causes an organism (development) to replicate the genome.

Knowledge in science: Ideas that stand in a tradition of criticism.

Knowledge is hard to come by.

Information with causal power that replicates between persons.

Imitation (of action patterns) is not sufficient for memes (and therefore true culture).

Memes must be understood in terms of counterfactual explanations, in terms of the invisible.

For example, to use a rock to crack open a nut -

An onlooker must understand:

• Mental states, i.e. 'they are hungry and want to eat the nut'.
• The nut can be eaten when cracked open etc.

Information that replicates (is stable) within a brain.

Also: autopoetic system, neuronal Darwinism.

A search process in the domain (or a subdomain) of possible software.

Brain or psychological development solves a software synthesis task.

I.e. a person must grow as a software that runs on the brain.

Evolution too is a search process in the domain of possible software.

A software capable of open ended creative knowledge creation, understanding.

A universal explainer [Deutsch].

Persons are capabable of understanding memes, and will partake in culture.

A person that was programmed artificially.

I.e. we program a software synthesis task that is sort of like the one the brain uses to grow a person.

Why can the brain grow persons but our computers cannot? This is the missing theory of personhood.

There is some reason that makes us currently not understand the problem well enough. Making progress on this problem is one of the open problems in science at this time.

agi disiderata

• Prohibiting an AGI to partake in culture would be unethical.
• Forcing an AGI to behave in some way would be slavery and unethical.
• Running AGI on computers might be generally ill-adviced, is not figured out. Erring on the side of caution is ethical.

Pointed against creativity, prohibiting open ended knowledge creation in same way.

(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.

(attempt…)

Programming in a paradigm that has creativity (critical rationalism) at the center of concerns.

It is easy to program a computer that plays correct chess. It is hard to program a computer that plays good chess.

Gary Sussman

Programming is not about solving puzzles, but about using ones complete set of creative problem solving capacity to explore and make progress on solving the problem at hand.

Programming languages should support the programmers 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.