Dear Robin,

It is fun to see a number of essays (Larissa's as well, on the animats) wrestle with the problem of defining "information processing" in a deeper, more rigorous fashion. And it's exciting to think that OK, we may actually be getting beyond what computer scientists have done in the past, which is to define computation as something useful to a third party.

Perhaps because computer scientists had to cleave off from the engineering department, they've been very reluctant to examine the underlying "physics" of their field--the study of the causal/mechanistic structures that underlie computation, and the generic properties we expect them to have.

It would be fun to apply the paradigm from the Information Theory of Individuality paper to a few toy examples. You could give some of your functions to agents in a little interacting system and give it a shot. I'd be curious to see what would happen, and whether the results would be illuminating. It would make a fun little paper.

Yours,

Simon

    • [deleted]

    • Post #11

    Thank you for this well written and referenced essay.

    From the comments here it seems that you intended to leave questions of the nature of consciousness out of your essay. The appearance of free will in the last part is therefore a bit confusing to the reader

    Maybe you could have split the last chapter to two, "Conclusions" and "For Further Study"?

      10 days later

      Dear Robin,

      I enjoyed reading your essay, and the approach you proposed to "make the case that there is no mysterious teleologic force that uniquely distinguishes purpose, intention, or will any more than there is an élan vital categorically distinguishing living from nonliving systems." Also, your proposal to see free will not as an on-or-off property, and not as the absence of determinism, but rather as a metric of purposiveness, as a specifically parametrised measure of individuation".

      Best regards,

      Cristi

        9 days later

        Dear Sirs!

        Physics of Descartes, which existed prior to the physics of Newton returned as the New Cartesian Physic and promises to be a theory of everything. To tell you this good news I use «spam».

        New Cartesian Physic based on the identity of space and matter. It showed that the formula of mass-energy equivalence comes from the pressure of the Universe, the flow of force which on the corpuscle is equal to the product of Planck's constant to the speed of light.

        New Cartesian Physic has great potential for understanding the world. To show it, I ventured to give "materialistic explanations of the paranormal and supernatural" is the title of my essay.

        Visit my essay, you will find there the New Cartesian Physic and make a short entry: "I believe that space is a matter" I will answer you in return. Can put me 1.

        Sincerely,

        Dizhechko Boris

        Dear Gavin,

        I disagree that I dismiss the problem as inconsequential. The approach I took essentially looks for a continuous spectrum of individualised function such that you cannot all of a sudden find "aims and intention" where they did not exist at a simpler level, but rather you can note properties that gradually look like something that we would recognise as aims and intention. Like life, it is not a boolean property but something that you can have more or less of. I find that makes its arising less mysterious.

        I have since read a similar line of reasoning (but much clearer) in "Complexity and the Arrow of Time". Here is an extract: https://twitter.com/robinberjon/status/847925822828761089.

        Regards,

        Dear Inés,

        thank you very much. Indeed, our approaches are similar and I very much like many of your ideas. I was particularly interested in the way in which you brought Fredkin into play, with garbage variables.

        Also, you state that "The task of the observer is to design the borders of the subsystem so as to allow ordered degrees of freedom to be progressively incorporated, and/or disordered ones to be eliminated." I wonder how that might be combined with the intrinsic approach to the same coarse-graining that I based on information-theoretic notions of individuality.

        Thanks, and best of luck!

        Dear Miles,

        you are right, maybe that is confusing. I think that it largely depends on writing traditions. In the classic French essay one is expected to use the conclusion to "open things up", and that's essentially what I'm doing here. (Also, I wrote it up in a hurry, so there's no doubt it's far from clear in places :)

        Thanks a lot for your feedback!

        Dear Cristinel,

        thank you very much for your kind words, I have to say that I very much liked your essay as well, as commented there :)

        Kind regards,

        Dear Simon,

        it is certainly true that I regularly find that discussions of information could benefit from, as it were, "a hacker's touch", or at the very least a dabbling in the implications of actually implementing a given idea. In fairness though, I am not sure that computer scientists are necessarily the worst offenders. Cosmologists maybe? :)

        I have been thinking indeed about experimenting in silico with these ideas, but writing this up has made painfully clear to me that I am missing solidity in a number of important intellectual tools, so I'm teaching myself more of the basics that I need -- it might therefore be a few months before I return to this.

        I very much enjoyed your paper, it is very rich in ideas and highly stimulating. I wanted to take the time to write some more detailed feedback before the end of this phase but I'll admit that it's still percolating through my brain. At any rate many thanks for that!

        Robin,

        I was impressed by your essay, and your approach to analysing and discussing the issue of agency and purpose. It is an excellent contribution to this essay contest.

        Regards,

        Lorraine

        19 days later

        Very sorry that I missed this excellent entry before voting closed :/ Frankly, the variance of the entries was so high that I just lost motivation, but this was an awesome entry and I flatter myself to say that it is similar in spirit to my own. Great work!

        Joe

          Hi Joe,

          many thanks for those kind words :) I'll admit I had missed your entry as well -- not only is there indeed high variance (which does contribute to the charm however, I love this contest) but I find the forum quite painful to use, such that engaging in discussions here is a lot less natural than it could be. I wish they would use something a decade or two more modern.

          Off to read your essay -- best of luck!

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