Ravishing journey exploring topics around simulatied realities. The question: Why should information patterns give rise to virtual realities?

The daring dust hypothesis idea: A simulated world recruits patterns, anywhere in reality, for it's existence.

The book gives a feel for the concept of emergence in this line of reasoning.

Multiverse, simulated realities, the role of knowledge, explanation and personhood in reality. Summarizes Popperian epistemology in eye opening ways.

• The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins (1976)
• The Extended Phenotype, Richard Dawkins (1982)

Beautiful and epic, with multiverse topics.

This is a timeless physics system, where the basic entities that exist are monads.

Monad: A thing that is not made from multiple parts, maximally simple i.e. non-compound. A monad is analogous to a point in euclidean geometry, infinitely small. But monads also don't have a location property. They are like symbols in a LISP system.

Causality is an emergent property of the monads, a 'pre-established harmony'. It is the same move, by assuming a large quantity of stuff, physics and perhaps things like qualia can be emergent.

The property of a 'good design'. Elegant design combines function, pragmatism and delight. "Durability, convenience, and beauty" - the Vitruvian Triad.

not-fire #11.

Art and design is a kind of dialog of the artist with the piece [Ranulph Glanville].

David Deutsch in The Beginning Of Infinity, also Why Are Flowers Beautiful? makes the case for a missing theory of objective beauty. The 'aesthetics part' of Deutsch's ideas.

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 actually sort of obvious problem, one the problems.

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 (human) brain should have 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;

Big Tao approaching simple / The Tao is simple

Lao Tzu, 571 BC

Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate

Plurality should not be posited wihtout necessity

William of Ockahm, 1287 - 1347 AD.

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

Leonardo da Vinci

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

In software, it is not the smallest amount of code that makes the best design. In my opinion something else is happening, that has to do with practicality, getting things done, obviousness and causal efficacy (Wirkungsmächtigkeit).

Braitenberg thought that if the brain's elegance heuristic is explaining (he thought that means predicting, i.e. having a world model) many things with a small amount of neuronal activation - the fewest neuronal ensembles.

If they brain finds a 'good idea that fits well', the overall activation would increase suddenly - even though the excitability might be low.

German: Gendankenblitz, 'Lightning thought': An epiphany, a 'flash of insight'.

Perhaps such a situation is the biological basis for humor. It would make sense that we evolved 'elegance detectors', using existing circuitry to train the neuronal nets - using some kind of reward signal.

Aristotelian physics is a 'marshmellow'. It doesn't cut the world at the joints as it were, but is a list of special cases. For instance, 'rocks natural place is the ground so they sink in water', 'woods natural place is above water', etc.

Compare it with Newtonian physics: There are only few simple entities (force, mass, acceleration, …) explaining a large amount of stuff.

design philosophy.

The best available theory about desing in nature. It says that all biological design is an adaptation.

Adaptation desiderata:

• The trait is a variation of an earlier form.
• The trait is heritable through the transmission of genes.
• The trait enhances reproductive success. [of genes]

wikipedia.

Adaptationism is the theory that puts knowledge at the center of biology. Biology is a science about software.

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, even 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.

Technology 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 / psychological development solves a software synthesis task.

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

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.

The problem of personhood is one of the problems of our time.

agi disiderata

• Prohibiting an AGI to partake in culture would be unethical.
• Forcing an AGI to behave in some / constraining it it 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 (Poppers 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.

A hiethertho not-understood property of software connected with the loss, absence or hindrance of creative flourishing.

Related, pain is an adaptation of organism, signaling a problem situation for reproductive success.

A theory of suffering is connected to the mind-body problem and relationship of biological information processing and ethics.

It is not required to know one is suffering, for suffering to occur. The phenomon of anosognosia provides the counter example.

Similiarly, perhaps animals don't suffer from the concept of death like we do.

Then, it also seems strange that phenomological consciousness would be required for suffering to occur.

Yuval Noah Harari [2018] says that suffering is the most real thing.

Even if our world was simulated on a computer by aliens, matrix style, then those aliens would have to be accountable for running such a simulation, involving this suffering.

Ethics is deeper than worlds. A typical inversion of reasoning that comes with a knowledge-based view.

Marvin Minsky thought that suffering is when something is preventing one from solving ones problem; A resource-based, intelligence - notion of suffering.

Dennett thought that pain is the way a software system says 'red alarm', similiar to the notion of Minsky - it needs to be something that cannot be ignored, and is annoying. Else it would not have the intended effect on the system.

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.

Zoologists generally assume animals suffer. Things like insect pain are research topics (Metazoa: Animal Minds and the Birth of Consciousness, Peter Godfrey-Smith is a cool overview).

Even though we have no theory of suffering, the decent thing to do is to err on the side of doubt and consider them suffering. Obviously so!

A dream where the person 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.

A lucid dream with a narrative where the main character knows they are dreaming, but without the locus of control.

Examples for the usually kafkaesque narrative:

The user is dreaming, aware that he is dreaming…

• … and investigated by dream police …
• … and faces his inner deamons, which control his subconsciousness and dream (damn you, Freud!)…
• … and faces characters from other dimensions etc. with the power to appear in persons dreams…

Of course these range from mystical to somewhat plausible, and rational thought can liberate from nonsensical believes, even while dreaming.

If all patterns (of information and therefore software) already exist in the multiverse, then the ideas exist out there. In a perspective flip, it is up the ideas to populate and recruit other parts of reality. Wherever there is a search process, an idea has the chance to invade the substrate.

This way around the brain is a kind of reciever of ideas and the ideas populate brain more or less succesfully. The ideas are 'alive', they are adapted to be better or worse ideas.

'Software animals' in the 'computational universe' [Steven Wolfram].