gnramires

Math is entirely subjective. "Proof" essentially means "Other educated practitioners have the same experience when trying to understand this."

The logical steps that proofs are built on all have that common foundation. Our concept of logic based on our subjective experience of "truth." We've built machines that reproduce our subjective processes mechanically, but there is no sense in which this idea of "true" is truly objective. It happens to be computationally convenient, and it has some relationship to experience, but that doesn't make it an independent reality that all possible observers, human and otherwise, would agree on.

I continue to think extensively about truth, but currently I disagree. There are senses in which truth can be well established, and those are quite important. I think the basic essence of truth is how we can make a statement (or a model), and have a system for measuring either reality or just mathematical/abstract objects, and verify the statement through this measurement.

As you note, for current mathematics it seems like all of it (all things we call mathematics at the moment) can in principle be formalized in a logic that is machine-verifiable, that is, essentially objective. We're well on our way to demonstrating this for most of mathematics (already most undergraduate curriculum). I think that's because almost the definition of math is that is has this property: in my opinion mathematics has distinguished itself as being the "science of certainty" as applied to language and abstract thought. The way this certainty is achieved is through agreeing on some fundamental assumptions and how certain rules (which are also assumptions themselves) can act on those assumptions to constitute theorems. Theorems are not necessarily physical-world truths/properties (at least not in a simple way in the universe we currently inhabit), you can study alternate physical laws that aren't compatible with our (approximately) Newtonian world, for example. They are logical/abstract-world truths that result from your assumptions. Pretty much by definition (and in a somewhat limited), then, mathematics (at least as far as things like truth of theorems in certain axiomatic systems) is inherently objective, machine-verifiable even.

What's left to be subjective, I would say, isn't really the notion of truth in mathematics, it's which assumptions we should elect to investigate, and which theorems should we elect to prove within those assumptions. Some mathematicians also have some notion of "absolute truth", and tend to reject systems of assumptions (axioms) that don't match what they regard as true -- basically going in reverse and searching for assumptions that can enable a theorem (which effectively acts as an additional assumption).

This activity needs certain basic premises to make sense, for example if a set of assumptions proves that a property holds, and also that a property doesn't hold; or if they predict a certain value X is the result of a dynamical model, and also predict that a different value Y is the result of such a model/equation, then we reject those premises. In a certain sense we are most interested in premises that have, even if a very weak, correspondence to reality.

I think it's more informative to recognize that it's not that everything is subjective[1], it's that everything is experimental. For example, the claim above that measurements and correct predictions can only have a singular valid value, corresponds to our experience with reality, in which in a certain way is singular; there are not multiple realities; objects have definite positions. Even if you think of quantum mechanics, in which we may say particles follow a distribution instead, we still say then there's a singular distribution a particle might have at any single time. Logic itself isn't random, it's connected to empirical observations about reality, which tends to increase the chance that conclusions for logic (which is made to share some properties with reality) tend to be valid in the physical world, of course often dependent on what additional statements you pile on top.

There is also another interesting lens that mathematics is artistic (and I think this will become increasingly important) -- making maths and learning maths is a kind of satisfying cognitive activity in its own right, and we also tend to chose what to explore mathematics on those grounds (in fact historically, pre-18th century say, this might be one of the main drivers of mathematical development, I believe[2]). But of course this is again just a reflection of the actual real properties of human cognition, and also this interest and satisfaction often becomes connected, if sometimes faintly, with the ability of math to represent reality (in a particularly satisfying way) and its objects of interest (for example patterns in nature). Another description for this aspect is maths as being hobby-like, about solving puzzles, or like a (hopefully enjoyable) game.

Note that for this particular "game", the objectivity (or if you prefer, machine-objectivity or consensus-machine-verifiability) of the rules and their application is a significant bonus, it makes the game much more interesting, increases its potential when everyone can agree and the rules and not "capricious" (simply dependent on whims of other people and judges); this gives practitioners safety and security and enables a wide social reach -- most games strive to have objective rules.

Arguably this kind of activity is valuable for the cognitive and subjective development of people that has lasting importance.

Animal brains can't abstract like (some of) our brains can. What are the odds our brains are limitless and don't have some similarly crippling limitations from a couple of levels up?

Well, this happens sometimes. In cases where there are phenomena like universality. For example, in any computation machine model (state machines, pushdown automata, etc.) has limitations that we can say makes them less powerful then Turing Machines. But then Turing machines can simulate any other machine, becoming a kind of ultimate or last stage (at least in terms of abstract capability) machine. It may be that our cognition has some bounded universality properties (I think it's likely it does).

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In summary, I still think mathematics has a lot of human potential in terms of (1) high level human guidance, (2) an internal artistic/subjective sensibility to the subject, (3) safeguarding human understanding of the world and associated individual intellectual development.

[1] Again, I just argued that there is a strong sense in which for example mathematics isn't subjective at all, but sure I do believe in a weak sense everything is subjective in the sense that everything is known or filtered or sensed through our minds which have limitations and aren't simple deterministic machines.

[2] For example, I believe for the Greeks geometry was intimately connected to philosophy/aesthetics (e.g. Platonism) and very little to applications. In ancient times and middle ages maths developed a lot from astronomical observations that had some applications but I think were largely cultural and ritualistic. In the late middle ages European aristocracy would fund mathematics largely for its inherent interest as an intellectual activity, and many nobleman enjoyed mathematics as a past time and would challenge each other to puzzles. Japan had Sangaku, in which mathematics was made for fun, aesthetic purposes and possibly bragging rights. No one actually needed to build say spheres in obtuse constructions with certain radii :)

https://archive.bridgesmathart.org/2014/bridges2014-111.pdf

Really cool, and although I am not quite up to date on biology research (relevant here), I believe there were exciting results showing mechanisms like electric fields acting as signals for cells to differentiate in some species, i.e. "telling a cell where it is", and supposedly guiding "what it should do/become", etc.. I believe this was a result from studying Axolotls, the amazing self-regenerating (and severely threatened of extinction in nature) salamanders[1].

Side note: if we needed more reasons to conserve the amazing and enormous spectrum of life, one more reason is this kind of discovery that might enable better understanding (and maybe enhancement one day) of cell growth and regeneration in humans. Also showing that biology in many ways is extremely far ahead of what humans can achieve with current technology or will for the foreseeable future (as much as the automata example is very neat, it's nowhere near self-assembling full working and self-reproducing creatures from a compact genetic code!).

It seems you can donate directly to help Axolotl conservation (which again is critically endangered), seems really important if you can help! [2] (although there are of course many other means to help if you're interested in conservation in general!)

[1] https://youtu.be/7cLaU_agj6k?&t=86

[2] https://www.moja.ong/programs/axolotl-habitat-conservation/ https://www.moja.ong/donar/

It's not just about the base algorithm. It's also about the memory needed to run it, and the clockspeed. For example, even the hardest problem you can imagine, if it has a verifier algorithm that fits in 4k (which means the solution itself can be much larger than 4k), then you can simply do a basic brute force search over the solution space. That doesn't mean this algorithm is very intelligent; it's only very capable if you have a sufficiently fast computer; although indeed brute force is only feasible for the simplest tasks in practice, so the idea that algorithms (of increasing sizes) enable (greater) intelligence is definitely a part of the story, but not the whole story. You can also think of DNA, which represents a recipe for our bodies and brain, which we then use (essentially as an "algorithm") to learn things, with degrees of freedom (memory) far surpassing what DNA stores.

Now if you had a very good chess program running in very constrained (dynamic/RAM) memory, then that'd be partially more revealing. From a cursory search there's a 1800 ELO engine for the C64, which seems very impressive but very far from the best human players.

I'd be interested to see a curve of ELO x Avaliable RAM for the best chess engines (up to given RAM), and how that compares to other games and activities.

On RAM vs ROM (program size) memory, I think at a high level dynamic memory helps you keep track of search paths in a large tree search, saving you some computation. Program size tends to enable improving the effectiveness of your search heuristic, as well as pre-computing e.g. initial and final game optimal moves (potentially saving arbitrarily much compute). I like thinking about those things because I think the search paradigm is pretty informative of computation (and even intelligence) in general. Almost every problem is basically some kind of heuristic search in some kind of space. And you tend to get better at things by refining your heuristics (usually through some experimental training process or theoretical insight), considering more options, exploring deeper consequences, etc..

I think what really defines humans isn't really our ability to solve problems or play chess well etc. (although that's extremely useful and also enjoyable most of the time), it's really our emotions and inner world. We are not really Thinking Machines in essence, we're Feeling Machines most significantly. The thinking part is a neat instrumental part :) We can delegate thinking to machines but what we cannot extinguish is feeling or the human "soul", because that is the source of all meaning.

I like the idea of some kind of algorithm minimalism, or at least parsimony; but I also think sometimes it might be appropriate? In this case, another approach would simply be randomization, which doesn't favor any name (Aaaaaron Aaaaanderson's blog :P ), this randomization can be consistent (such that you can find something you wish in linear time).

I think equally important is algorithmic transparency, that is, that the algorithm be publicly disclosed (although I think simplicity is a component of transparency: if you just dump a huge incomprehensible algorithmic mess somewhere that's not very helpful), so that you at least know what you are getting into, and better yet have some ability to choose and make educated critique of the current state of things (i.e. does the algorithm just maximize engagement like a slot machine? or does it optimize for some kind of helpfulness?).

This is extremely far from any of my expertises, but I'll offer an answer while no one else did (please correct me!). Basically, all medicine (i.e. drugs) we have are proteins or certain compounds that fit within some of our cell's (or viruses) molecules and does funny stuff to them, like disabling certain parts, acting as a signal to regulate behavior, and so on. Doing funny stuff is basically about fitting into another molecule. So research about how proteins (most molecules (after water) in our body, I guess) interact is incredibly important in basically all medicine, specially in the discovery of medicine (like suggesting compounds (drug) that could fit in certain receptors or perform certain function), and understanding disease/pathologies (which give ideas on how to prevent and treat them).

If folding@home helps to understand and model this behavior of molecules (which I guess tends to be difficult and unreliable to do without the aid of computers), it is extremely helpful. Now I don't know other details like, perhaps molecular biology is the bottleneck and there is scant available molecules to analyze (reducing its impact/marginal sensitivity), or perhaps compute really is a bottleneck in this particular problem. But nonetheless it seems like a great project for which contributions do make a difference.

(Note: although, that said, if you were expecting something like 'compute->miracle drug comes out', I believe that's not quite how it works; research in general rarely works that way, I think because the constraint space and problem space that would require this approach is too large and complicated; and in fact I believe many if not most significant discoveries have resulted from playing around and investigating random molecules, often from (nonhuman) animals, plants and bacteria[1]; although molecular sciences (molecular biology) seem to enable a slightly more methodological approach)

[1] The GLP-1 based weight loss drugs for example came from investigating the Gila monster lizard venom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GLP-1_receptor_agonist#History

This is not a super well thought out position, but I've been leaning towards really disliking AI art in general (without having an opinion on any strong policy action yet).

First, art is, I think, one of the most enjoyable activities we have. One evidence is a lot of people forego higher salaries to choose an art job (although being a job carries additional responsibilities and some inconveniences compared to doing it as a hobby). It's a shame to see it diminished, when I believe we should be diverting efforts to automate other stuff.

Second, most AI art I've seen has been quite substandard compared to human art. We still don't know very well what human emotions are, the origin of sentience and qualia, etc.. But I think humans still lead here in having and probably understanding emotions. While for other tasks most implementation detail is irrelevant (e.g. in code, that it works tends to be most important, vs. minute choices in style), in art every detail is particularly relevant. Knowing this, it bothers me usually when I see this art that it doesn't carry the same knowledge of context and nuance a human would have.

Third, There's also the effect of making me question whether each piece of artwork was made by a human or AI, that didn't exist before. It does carry a bit of a magical feeling I think knowing a real person made every piece of artwork prior to 2018 or so (I think algorithmic art[1] is fine in this regard, because it tends to be more clearly algorithmic, and the involvement of the artist in coding is significant), that is now gone or at risk. Even the thought of imagining say their work day or what they had for lunch or talked to coworkers or friends is pleasant to me (at the risk of romanticizing it too much).

I suppose if AI art actually understood human nature, and specially the specific context of each art piece, better than us some of my arguments might be diminished. But the negatives so far seem to outweigh the positives, and I would like to e.g. give preference to content that doesn't use AI art.

(It is, admittedly, also the case that we lost a similar amount of craftsmanship when the industrial revolution happened, and in return we were able to support a larger population, and greater material conditions for most people. Every object now isn't carefully handcrafted. I think it's different because well, now material conditions are relatively abundant, and second there's no such insatiable, significant and irreplaceable demand for art as there were to common industrialized objects (take shoes for example), at least not to the same extent or vital significance. That is, the ability to have a shoe at all far outweighs it being carefully handcrafted, I believe; while experiencing a poorly made AI movie or artwork might be actually worse than none at all (or simply an older human made movie), and it also gets more cumbersome to evaluate for ourselves whether AI was employed or not. Also, while say shoes only last a limited time and need to be constantly produced, good artwork can last indefinitely (using digital storage), and even if you account for cultural change and relevance, can still last a really long time, motivating investing more into it.)

I'm quite sure that if we're still around in 500 or so years, we'll still be enjoying say Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh (probably as a digital reproduction). Current AI art will probably be largely discarded, so seems largely an unwise investment. Actually this kind of applies to code as well. It seems plausible Linux could still be used in 500 years from now (see how we still value finding Unix v4 50 years after), or at least of some interest. Those durable intellectual goods don't seem like wise places to invest anything but the best of us :) (at least in the cases it's not disposable)

The arguments above also don't seem to apply say in concept stages, or say for bland corporate diagrams that will be disposed of in 1 day, and which a huge quantity is needed. I think the main criteria I would evaluate is (1) Was it enjoyable to produce (for the artist(s))?; (2) Will it have a significant (artistic) impact on who is experiencing it?; (3) Will it last a long time?

[1] W.r.t. algorithmic art (and digital in general) (take bytebeat[2] for example), which is a field I really love, I am not any kind of absolutist about it. I know there tends to be extremely more degrees of freedom for human expression in a manual piece than in an algorithmic piece, so I see it more as a complement and not a substitute for more conventional art. I'd never give up ever hearing human musician player music for bytebeat, just bytebeat is a lovely experimental other dimension of expression. Writing a prompt seems a too few degrees of freedom and context, and too much of an uniform context that is less rich than humans can provide.

[2] https://dollchan.net/bytebeat/

Disclaimer: I really like Open source.

I think without open source something similar might have happened to a lot of software, but instead of becoming Open, they'd become gratis (free/zero cost), or almost so. The heart of the matter is that software has near-0 cost of distribution, so making 1 trillion is basically the same cost (to the developer) as making 1 unit. So since developers have free economies of scale, they are highly incentivized to lower the price to capture most of the market, I think. Software also requires relatively little maintenance, it doesn't rot[1] -- good software basically lasts forever with some minor up-keeping. Add in competition, and the tendency is for cost to go to near 0, at least for relatively popular software. But then there are two problems:

(1) If the company goes under, the software is lost, or rather it could be reverse engineered with huge difficulty and some information loss about the actual code.

(2) The incentives are still not well aligned with users. The makers are incentivized to rely on advertisements, get (and sell) user data, make their software addictive, and more.

On (1), FOSS software guarantees the source will be available and can be ported to new systems, basically becoming a common good. On (2), the incentives are very well aligned for FOSS, development can become a community effort, and in the rare case a developer would turn to collecting and selling user data or dark patterns, the software can be forked for example. In particular Open source funded by grants, donations and community/voluntary work is very aligned with public interest.

I get the downside that it could be unfair that developers aren't being paid as much, but I believe it wouldn't be much of a difference in income (for those kinds of software), and we can and should as a community donate to open source efforts (and since it's clearly in the public benefit I think governments, companies and all sorts of organizations would be wise to do so).

Finally, you're basically still free to create and sell closed source software, you just have to compete with community and volunteer efforts. I think it's well within your right (and it might make sense in some cases, say niche software). But I think it's worth considering carefully wether it's best for the product, for you and for the community to have it closed or open.

(also, indeed you can sell FOSS, but to be honest I don't know of many success stories in this regard (anyone share some examples?); I know arduino which is open software/hardware was very successful selling their genuine boards/having a pay request on download that you can dismiss. On Linux package managers make this difficult, although Flathub recently added donation buttons!).

[1] There are some issues popularly called "software rot", but it's basically some relatively minor (compared to the rot of many physical goods) compatibility issues when interacting systems change.

Something I think is worth pointing out: this is happening in the Netherlands, i.e. their jurisdiction. I think most people here aren't from the Netherlands. I think they should be free to try out the legislation they want, and people elsewhere don't need to agree. It's good that different countries can try different things, and if that doesn't work it's a lesson for other places, and if it works that's even better. People on the internet tend to focus too much on uniformity and conformity, as if we lived everyone in the same place.

I think another model could help here. Like an automatic/anonymous micropayment when you access a website. This could be a fraction of your internet subscription reserved for micropayments. It should be possible, and cryptocurrencies aren't necessary either (although similar cryptographic constructions may be used, no need for proof of work).

"I live my life in widening circles

that reach out across the world.

I may not complete this last one

but I give myself to it.

I circle around God, around the primordial tower.

I’ve been circling for thousands of years

and I still don’t know: am I a falcon,

a storm, or a great song?"

-- Rainer Maria Rilke

You might enjoy some of my writings on formalizing meaning (see here[1] and follow the links). In some way, although not always reliable, you can say that if you feel A is more meaningful than B, that is already some kind of evidence for this assertion even if perhaps unreliable in some ways.

So there isn't necessarily some huge crisis that you need to justify: in some ways reality just is (and this includes subjective reality;).

Say if you ask why do the laws of physics conserve energy locally, you can actually argue that if it were otherwise actually life would be extremely more unlikely, as that tends to increase instability in various systems (both energy divergence and going to 0 makes life unlikely); but still I'm almost certain you could conceive of forms of life in non-energy-conservative systems (something like Conway's Game of Life, but maybe with more advance rules if you prefer). So while it makes sense that the physics in our universe is approximately locally conservative (maybe not exactly in GR?), in totality it's just kind of a brute fact, an experimental observation. Our theories help us devise say better experiments to test e. conservation, and in a way map out the landscape of consistent physical laws. But they don't tell you which realization of consistent or admissible laws you'll find yourself in.

Other way to phrase it, what you feel is in a way real. So if you feel in some fundamental way better reading A than B, then that simply reflects a property of reality and needs no further explanation. The only problem is that in some cases our judgement can be distorted, like by substances or maybe overwhelming blinding desires (that fail to reflect fundamental experiences) or by limitations of our memory, etc.. But if we assume this isn't the case (i.e. some pathological reason for your preference), then your feeling is valid irrespective of a wordy justification. I think some things really are subjective, but also believe in a fundamental and very complex way subjectivity is actually as objective as anything else. I think the fact that one experience is actually (with some important caveats and necessary context) better than another in what might be called essentially an objective sense, is one of the most counterintuitive things we will come to accept about the human mind. We tend to mistaken complexity (it's very complex to compare experiences) to impossibility (it's impossible to judge experiences objectively).

I believe in principle there might be the equivalent Laws of Physics (say Newtonian mechanics) for the human mind, but I suspect we're still very far from it, because it might require analyzing the network of n=100 trillion synapses in our brain. I think one day we might get there, but that would probably require something like a computational effort maybe at least several times n, or even on the order of n², or some other poly(n), and also poly(n) memory. If we think of one of the major objectives of physical law is to make predictions, and explain behavior, and say to aid in engineering and designing structures, I think one of the main objective of the laws of the mind would be say to predict whether say an experience or mental state is good or not, and explain why it is so; and then perhaps allow improving a little the design of things so that we have better experiences, that is, a better life. I guess this is already what say psychology, various spiritual traditions, philosophy and arts try to achieve (and I think gets already in many cases pretty close, maybe increasingly closer, to the still inaccessible extremely complicated reality of the human mind and brain).

Regardless, we often have to do our best with what we have today, which is our best-effort subjective judgement, aided by language various human disciplines :)

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1n6j1jg/pur...

If you have a very high enough refresh rate display, then yes: just flash alternatingly black-over-white and white-over-black text (i.e. invert it). We perceive essentially a low-pass filtered visual input (with limitations like neural firing rate), eventually it should appear as just uniform gray. Maybe adding some confusing elements might make it feasible at lower refresh rates.

I am not a super experienced coder or anything. But I like thinking about it[1].

The way I've been thinking about it is about organization. Organize code like we should organize our house. If you have a collection of pens, I guess you shouldn't leave them scattered everywhere and in your closet, and with your cutlery, and in the bathroom :) You should set up somewhere to keep your pens, and other utensils in a kind of neat way. You don't need to spend months setting up a super-pen-organizer that has a specially sculpted nook for your $0.50 pen that you might lose or break next week. But you make it neat enough, according to a number of factors like how likely it is to last, how stable is your setup, how frequently it is used, and so on. Organizing has several advantages: it makes it easier to find pens, shows you a breath of options quickly, keeps other places in your house tidier and so less cognitively messy as well. And it has downsides, like you need to devote a lot of time and effort, you might lose flexibility if you're too strict like maybe you've been labeling stuff in the kitchen, or doing sketches in your living room, and you need a few pens there.

I don't like the point of view that messiness (and say cognitive load) is always bad. Messiness has real advantages sometimes! It gives you freedom to be more flexible and dynamic. I think children know this when living in a strict "super-tidy" parent house :) (they'd barely get the chance to play if everything needs to be perfectly organized all the time)

I believe in real life almost every solution and problem is strongly multifactorial. It's dangerous to think a single factor, say 'cognitive load', 'don't repeat yourself', 'lesser lines of code', and so on is going to be the single important factor you should consider. Projects have time constraints, cost, need for performance; expressing programs, the study of algorithms and abstractions itself is a very rich field. But those single factors help us improve a little on one significant facet of your craft if you're mindful about it.

Another factor I think is very important as well (and maybe underestimated) is beauty. Beauty for me has two senses: one in an intuitive sense that things are 'just right' (which capture a lot of things implicitly). A second and important one I think is that working and programming, when possible, should be nice, why not. The experience of coding should be fun, feel good in various ways, etc. when possible (obviously this competes with other demands...). When I make procedural art projects, I try to make the code at least a little artistic as well as the result, I think it contributes to the result as well.

[1] a few small projects, procedural art -- and perhaps a game coming soon :)

Also, more to the point of your observation: we should be indeed very careful about any extreme and any maximization, because I presume when we maximize a lot we tend to bump into limitations of the metric or theories employed. So we should only maximize up to a region of fairly high philosophical confidence, and this is why we need progress in philosophy, psychology, philosophy of arts, philosophy of culture, neurophilosophy, etc.. in lockstep with technological progress -- because technology tends to allow very easy maximization of simplified models of meaning, which may rapidly break down.

I think one example might be that in medieval times maximizing joy and comfort could be a pretty good heuristic in a harsh life of labor. Those days we actually perhaps have to seek out some discomfort now and then, otherwise we'd be locked in our homes or bed ridden with all affordances some of us have; we have to force ourselves to exercise and not eat comfort food all the time; etc.. I think some hard drugs are a good example as well, a kind of technology that allows maximizing desire/pleasure in a way that is clearly void and does not seem associated with overall good experiences long term. An important fact is that our desires do not necessarily follow what is good; our desires are no omniscient/omnibelevolent oracles (they're simply a limited part of our minds).

We need to put thought/effort into discovering and then enacting what is good in robust, wise, careful (but not too careful), etc. ways. Let's build an awesome society and awesome life for all beings :)

Good question, and I've spent a few years investigating this sort of question :)

It led me to investigate formalizing ethics and if that would be even possible (so we don't fall into traps like you've mentioned)

I think I've gotten pretty good results which I've sketched here: https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1iv1x1m/the...

More to come. In summary, I became confident that we can, if we're careful, know those things and do something like 'maximize happiness' (as I said, I prefer more general terms than happiness! There's a whole universe of inner experiences beyond just the stereotypical smiley person, I think -- I tend to think of 'maximizing meaning' or 'maximizing well-being').

The basic fact that allows this process to make sense, I guess, is that our inner experiences are real in some sense, and there are tools to study them. Not only are our inner lives real, they make part of the world and its causal structure. We can understand (in principle almost exactly, if we could precisely map our minds and brains) what causes what feelings, what is good and what isn't (by generalizing and philosophically querying/testing/red teaming/etc.), and so on for every facet of our inner worlds.

In fact, this (again in principle) would allow us to make definite progress on what matters, which is our inner lives[1]. I think Susanne Langer put it incredibly well: (on the primacy of experiences as the source of meaning)

"If nothing is felt, nothing matters" (Susanne K. Langer)

This is an experimental fact, we as conscious beings experimentally see this fact is true. So in a way the mind/brain is kind of like a tool which allows us to perceive (with some unreliability and limitations that can be worked with) reality, in particular inner reality.

We can actually understand (with some practical limitations) the world of feelings and what matters. To that we simply experiment, collect evidence and properties about feelings and inner lives, try to build theories that are consistent, robust to philosophical (that is, logical in a high level sense) objections; and then we simply do what is best, or if necessary try out a bunch of ways of life and live out the best way according to our best theories.

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Addendum: Let's take the benzene ring as an illustrative example of our procedure. Someone claims 'a benzene ring is the happiest thing in the Universe, and we therefore must turn everything into a sea of benzene rings. Destroy everything else.'. Is that claim actually true? Let's explore.

It isn't, I claim: if "Nothing is felt, nothing matters". When you are asleep (and not dreaming or thinking at all, let's suppose) or dead, you don't feel anything. No, thoughts are, and must be, associated with activity in our brain. No information flowing and no brain activity, no thoughts. No thoughts, no inner life. Moreover, thoughts require a neural (and logical) infrastructure to arise. It's logically consistent with how we don't observe ourselves as rocks, gas clouds, mountains, benzene molecules, or anything else: we observe ourselves as mammals with actually large brains. There are immensely more rocks, gas particles, benzene molecules, etc.. then there are mammals in the universe. Yet we experience ourselves as mammals. Benzene molecules, rocks and gas clouds just don't have enough structure to support minds and experience happiness.

That's a cute story, I certainly like its tone of mystery.

However, the premise seems a bit wrong (or at least the narrator is wrong). If your brain actually degenerates from usage of the ring (and is no longer used in daily life, acting only reflexively), the premise that you are the happiest from following the ring might be flat out wrong. I think happiness (I tend to think in terms of well-being, which let's say ranks every good thing you can feel, by definition -- and assume the "good" is something philosophically infinitely wise) is probably something like a whole-brain or at least a-lot-of-brain phenomenon. It's not just a result of what you see or what you have in life. In fact I'm sure two persons can have very similar external conditions and wildly different internal lives (for an obvious example compare the bed-ridden man who spends his day on beautiful dreams, and the other who is depressed or in despair).

What the ring seems to do is to put you in situations where you would be the happiest, if only you were not wearing the earring.

The earring that actually guides you toward a better inner life perhaps offers only very minimal and strategic advice. Perhaps that's what the 'Lotus octohedral earring' does :)

Personally, I give to projects I use (and ones that need most help), and I'm happy that say my younger self or people with no conditions can still use it without paying. I think there should probably be better coordinated efforts in this direction, from say companies to governments. But meanwhile individual donations are already pretty powerful if even a small % of people that can donate do.

In particular, governments traditionally already allocate resources for the common benefit (their main function really), in public research and public science, public infrastructure, etc.. I think this is just another very significant extension of that.

Also companies benefit greatly from OS/(and OSHW in the future?), and frequently maintain private tools at significant costs. Open source can be seen as a coordination mechanism where everybody can (or rather, should) cooperate to lower costs and benefit everyone (basically, their whole industry or rather society gets more efficient) :)

Yea, I am indeed quite deficient in HTML knowledge and webpages in general. I'll look into PHP, thanks. Overall I have standards (that might be unachievable?) that I think tools should aim to be extremely simple if at all possible (at least there should be niche tools that achieve this, I mean), and what I've seen from web development doesn't quite meet those goals :P

I really like OpenSCAD for instance, which despite being a little difficult to do complex stuff with, is quite easy to learn (and you can indeed do complex things with a little methodology). Like, everything about the web seems a little obtuse to me. One day I'll learn a little more to hopefully make more educated comments :)

I confess I have failed multiple times to build simple web pages (like a blog and homepage, admittedly after not too much effort), while I've made multiple fairly complex javascript animations using canvas and p5.js library. And I've made a few websites as a kid! (I'm not sure using free WYSIWYG or HTML directly).

So appreciate a lot new developments in the really-easy-to-use open source and text tools that also enable more involved use case!

Admittedly I also have not tried to learn React or other frameworks (most times I got stuck on backend basics).

It would be awesome if (almost) anyone could easily type out a website using simple and open source tools (specially with a little more involved functionality than just static content, or more free looks), and it just worked (with minimal coding required for the backend -- that's what's great about plain html imo, it's just a few files that contain your whole website). I mean, meanwhile it's great that something like hosted blogs exist of course.

I don't know, I can't really justify spending say 8 hours sitting -- and much less more time. We need to go for a walk, drink water, stop staring at a screen to stay reasonably healthy. Maybe there could be an hour bank or something and you can do a 8 hour stint once in a while if you really wanted. When you're young that doesn't feel so painful, but as you get older you start noticing the health implications of this kind of habit, it's very destructive. For example it can affect your spine, insulin resistance (cause pre-diabetes/diabetes), and more. At least if I were designing an MMO, my conscience would demand I think seriously about this.

But really this (although I think it can be helpful and important) does not get to the heart of the matter which is good, non-dark-pattern-filled game design. Again I don't think this is just a matter or regulation, but requires both a game dev and gamer culture that favors the healthier and more full of wonder, communication and learning (opposed to just gambling addiction) kind of games.

Reflecting a bit, I really see not plausible justification why say one account should be let to be logged in for more than 3 hours/day (say specially during workweek). Even if you really have no job, at that point I don't think it's adding to your wellbeing.

I myself really enjoyed a game (Tibia, very popular here in Brazil) during my childhood, and, living in a large metropolis (and at the time quite violent too) and with limited opportunities for play, it was a saving grace in some ways. It really served as a playground analogue to the real world, where I could talk to people from other cultures all over the world, practice a foreign language (english), practice commerce, planning, and lots of really nice things I think it's fair to say. I think excesses of gaming were already in common consciousness at the time, and the occasional warning from my parents (in no way prohibitive) was a great reminder -- me and my older brother did check whether we were getting something good out of the experience. Specially as the dial-up internet cost was very large! (later replaced by broadband to the relief of my father). I'm also glad it didn't overwhelm my childhood.

That game has since added soft limits (already in 2006 according to the wiki), which I think are better than nothing, but probably there should be some hard limits as well (even if you're really conservative about limits... surely at least something like 8 hours a day could be universally agreed upon).

There are valid objections to those kinds of limits because there are all sorts of exceptions: bedridden people that need an activity, people that just use the game as a chatroom (quite common) to keep in touch with friends, etc.. I think those people can find other activities and other media to fill their time and chat.

It's also probably unlikely that those limits are going to be voluntarily enforced by all companies. I think regulation in this area is important -- in a way, those limits are actually good for the medium: they allow a minimally healthy baseline to exist and the market not be dominated by the worst, most damaging grindfests. But also probably just regulation has limits, and it's important for individual/collective conscience, education and cultural awareness to exist, so people pay attention that each activity is adding, to their lives, being meaningful (this includes social media usage, all sorts of games, etc. -- but could apply to doing anything too much like watching TV or talking to friends even). Boredom is the instinctive response that encourages taking other activities, but unfortunately adversarial design and dark patterns (and even just too captivating activities) have found ways to override this response simply to generate profit.

Moreover, as a game designer, we should be really be thinking about bringing worthwhile experiences into this world, things that teach (in all sorts of ways), move, challenge, captivate, inspire and connect us. Here's a heuristic I like: take your favorite memories and feelings and try to replicate, extend and generalize them in various ways for others.

Every sentence ever spoken and every view ever looked at is also a number. It's not a freaky thing about "things like" busy beaver, it's a freaky thing about the concept of information.

I'd say that's a bit of a wrong or misleading statement. I think the correct version is "everything[1] can be encoded as a number". The concept of number is a very particular concept! It's pretty absurd to say "a screwdriver is a number" or "a word is a number". That is true for the peano axiomatization of numbers; but to me in particular, I believe numbers are a generalization (and formalization) of the idea or concept of quantity. There's a particular idea that refers to say 'two' apples, the quantity of apples. A word is not a quantity, it's a different concept. Even though each of them could be encoded as a number somehow!

[1]: Everything that we believe to be finite and of interest, that is. We don't know presently anything that could be used in reality (a music, picture, etc.) that can't in principle be encoded as a large enough number.

I think this is quite interesting, because this encoding is critical, and it completes the system. You essentially need a machine to turn things into numbers and numbers into things; and this is unavoidable. You can actually encode this machine itself with numbers! This number (which encodes this transcoding machine) can even be decoded by its own machine! But we cannot actually avoid the machine itself, some actual realization in the real world, because any number, in order to represent something, can only be translated by one "machine" (which can be essentially a computer, or a mind, etc.).

Instead of thinking of machines, you can also think of conventions. So you can have a convention that say the number '5' encodes the concept 'word', or maybe it simply encodes the string of letters "word" ("w"+"o"+"r"+"d"). But the convention interpretation isn't complete, because you still need someone, or something, to interpret this convention in practice and potentially turn concepts into reality, or simply manipulate those concepts in significant and useful ways.

Some more examples: (1) you can encode objects by describing a series of solid operations, essentially CAD modelling, so you have numbers that represent solids. The machine that interprets this number and is able to translate it for example into a picture, a series of instructions to be interpreted by a 3d printer, of performs operations (inferences) about the relevant solid model (for example, a structural analysis) is your "machine", i.e. your software, without which a number, or string of bits by itself doesn't mean anything (except the quantity associated with that binary number, perhaps), and again this encoding or number is essentially arbitrary, it could be very different. (2) a JPEG file for example encodes an image that is read by a software stack (jpeg decoder+picture viewer+operating system+display driver) and forwarded to your monitor to be viewed as a pixel array. Again the string of bits associated with any image could in principle represent anything else representable.

Information (Shannon information in particular) simply implies the encoding possible.

It's really interesting that a lot of the time we are performing essentially translations between different representations of a thing: a series of bits into states of pixels on a screen (a picture), [a series of bits] into a 3d printed object, into a visualization of an object on a screen, etc. (one way), or a reading of a camera sensor (photograph) into a series of bits, a conception of an object (3d modelling), a conception of a story (writing), etc. (the other way). We of course can (and must for them to be built of course) conceptualize those "machines" themselves (e.g. the software part), represent them in some way (our encoding), and then turn this representation into a realization of those machines (a software, a piece of hardware, or just a representation convention, etc.).

In other words, the mind or computer itself is always an integral part of the process, and information in a vacuum doesn't represent anything necessarily.

Finally, most of what we do is some kind of translation, inference, and construction -- everything to assist our lives. Of course some "machines" are capable of generating new concepts, those are very interesting "machines" :)

That definitely seems like it could be universal :)

Yes, and I think the question of stability is very interesting, specially as those are continuous systems with non-local effects. To prove universality, you're probably going to need to prove that small perturbations that might be inevitable (unless values decay in finite distances) maintain a given behavior, with "regenerative" properties: analogous to fan-in/fan-out in electronic gates (basically, iterated gate applications need to have points or basins of attraction, usually 0 or 1, such that if your system gets noisy, this noise is eventually eliminated and the signal "regenerated"). If you can build a NAND gate within a kind of cell, and show that it's stable w.r.t perturbations, and has regenerative output, I think that would be enough (in that case not only universality is achieved in a technical sense, but in a very robust sense as well) to build a TM.

The spaces of parameters that achieve Turing completeness would be really cool to see as well.

Preferably, your cell should output a "packet", which should permit, given a synchronization source, that this packet travel toward other cells but also avoid other packets traveling in say an orthogonal direction, that is, you should allow wire crossings. If your system doesn't allow wire crossings, I suspect you may be able to prove Turing completeness is impossible, at least I believe you can prove (left as an exercise :) ) that realizing some circuits may require crossings. Alternatively, you can build gates/cells with multiple inputs and multiple outputs, such that effectively one of the gates allows for information to cross over.

Note: I believe this difficulty of building complex systems in 2 dimensions might partially explain why we live in 3 dimensions! It's just very hard for a complex life form to evolve in a 2D system because of, among other things, this connectivity difficulty (in 3D you can basically just route wires/tubes anywhere :) ), this is assuming some form of a generalized Copernican Principle (that we exist probabilistically in possible universes). 4 dimensions and higher may produce similar connectivity difficulties, but in terms of too much connectivity instead of too little. I presume we can explain to a significant understand the whys of why physics is it the way is in our universe using this principle (which appears to me to be a generalization of the Anthropic principle).

It's an interesting idea, I've never tried it. It could also be a simple VM running a given OS (with reduced need for hardware support), or an application running interpreted code with the environment UI.

Generally the idea is to expand UX in more interesting/fun directions without incurring significant hurdles associated with an OS (where everything needs to run reliably and be secure).

I've found this quite interesting related discussion: "Classical "Single user computers" were a flawed or at least limited idea" https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/tech/SingleUserComp... (discussion on lobste.rs: https://lobste.rs/s/plkdy5/classical_single_user_computers_w...)

I also think this kind of idea can be fun speculation, but I think there are better things to have fun that aren't promoting wrong ideas (like literal Science Fiction speculation!). When we can build fun on top, the physics of our reality doesn't need to be (academically) fun by itself :)

I think we shouldn't[1] be making Operating Systems, per se, but something like Operating Environments.

An Operating Environment (OE) would be a new interface, maybe shell and APIs to access file systems, devices, libraries and such -- possibly one that can be just launched as an application in your host OS. That way you can reuse all facilities provided by the host OS and present them in new, maybe more convenient ways. I guess Emacs is a sort of Operating Environment, as browsers as well. 'Fantasy computers' are also Operating Environments, like pico-8, mini micro[2], uxn, etc..

Of course, if you really have great a low-level reason to reinvent the way things are done (maybe to improve security, efficiency, DX, or all of that), then go ahead :)

The main reasons is the difficulty in developing robust low-level systems like file systems, the large number of processors you may want to support, and also creating or porting a huge number of device drivers. At this point Linux for example supports a huge number of devices (of course you could use some sort of compatibility layer). Also, developing a new UX is very different from developing a new low-level architecture (and you can just plug the UX into existing OSes).

In most cases an OS shell (and an OE), from the user point of view, is "just" a good way of finding and launching applications. Maybe a way of finding and managing files if you count the file manager in. It shouldn't get too much in the way and be the center of attention, I guess. (This contrasts with its low level design, which has a large number functions, APIs, etc.). But also it should probably be (in different contexts) cozy, comfortable, beautiful, etc. (because why not?). A nice advanced feature is the ability to automate things and run commands programmatically, which command shells tend to have by default but are more lacking in graphical shells. And I'm sure there is still a lot to explore in OS UX...

[1] I mean, unless you really have a reason with all caveats in mind of course.

[2] https://miniscript.org/MiniMicro/index.html#about

Nice! I wonder if there are studies of Turing completeness for those systems?

I didn't get to read it in its entirety.

I personally think we can view logic(s) as tools. I think in a way Bayesian/probabilistic/fuzzy logics (and extensions) are more useful or appropriate in a greater setting than binary logic. We don't really know anything to absolute certainty in real life, as there may always be interfering things getting in the way of our conclusions and our senses -- and although that's just a theoretical impediment usually (we are quite sure of many things, like say that the set of primes is unbounded), in many real life cases it's very relevant, and we're usually making fuzzy judgements about things (like, the success of a venture, whether we will enjoy one thing or another, which path to take, etc.). But it doesn't make sense to declare binary logic obsolete. Think of it as floats and ints (integers). Although we can represent integers using floating point representation, in many cases representing things as ints is much more efficient and simpler. In the same way boolean logic, perhaps the simplest practical logic, is extremely useful in many cases.

Binary logic (in terms of binary expressions and binary circuits) of course is also universal, as you can represent anything in binary -- so the choice of logic, given several universal choices, comes down to application and setting (including physical realization of the circuits/logic and its match to your application).

For example, analog control circuits were (overwhelmingly up to the 80s perhaps) extremely useful in factories controlling processes, and there are relatively simple physical implementations of linear controls using electronics, and even (mechanical) mechanisms. Then we got really good at building small digital circuits and their analog implementation became mostly irrelevant (but still were an important stage for industrial development). With appropriate non-linearities large analog networks are universal as well though (hence Neural Networks, which happen to be implemented using binary circuits currently, but who knows this might change :) ).

So I think it may be fair to see fuzzy logics as more general and more general in some sense, but they are equivalent in other senses to any universal logic (at least as far as taking computable approximations of continuous quantities).

I read a while ago about Cyc's approach to Ontologies, which I understood to be systems used to prove desired claims. There were hierarchical ontologies, in the sense that if you failed to prove some claim in a certain system, you could resort to a slower, but more powerful system (in the sense that it could decide more claims). I guess you can interpret fuzzy logics as a higher ontology in another sense -- the sense of which our knowledge is really always uncertain and precisely evaluating this uncertainty may be necessary (versus just approximating claims as True/False) -- so probabilistic logics would be higher in both the sense of less efficient and more complete.

Note also how things can change and you may want/need to extend your logic indefinitely! Consider how it may be useful to go beyond a simple uncertainty of a claim, and consider for example how reliable this uncertainty itself is: e.g. it may be useful to distinguish between something you know nothing about, which you might arguably attribute probability 50% to, and something you know for sure has a probability of 50%, like a coin flip -- which in turn seems like a more powerful system to be used when it gives better results than the ones which convey less information.

The view of course that you're just building increasingly sophisticated binary systems that more effectively address your tasks persists valid (and relevant as we still use binary computers), again as the fact that other logics are valid too.

The reason it gets reinvented all the time is because while it's often quite straight forward in statically compiled languages it isn't for dynamic languages as finding out what actually is unused is hard (for fine grained code elimination) or at lest unreliable (pruning submodules). Even worse for scripting languages.

It seems to me in a strict sense the problem of eliminating dead code may be impossible for code that uses some form of eval(). For example, you could put something like eval(decrypt(<encrypted code>,key)), for a user-supplied key (or otherwise obfuscated); or simply eval(<externally supplied code>); both of which could call previously dead code. Although it seems plausible to rule out such cases. Without eval() some of the problem seems very easy otoh, like unused functions can simply be removed!

And of course there are more classical impediments, halting-problem like, which in general show that telling if a piece of code is executed is undecidable.

( Of course, we can still write conservative decisions that only cull a subset of easy to prove dead code -- halting problem is indeed decidable if you are conservative and accept "I Don't Know" as well as "Halts" / "Doesn't Halt" :) )

The way I see it:

(1) There is kind of a definition of a chair. But it's very long. Like, extremely long, and includes maybe even millions to billions of logical expressions, assuming your definition might need to use visual or geometric features of a given object to be classified as a chair (or not chair).

This is a kind of unification of neural networks (in particular LLMs) and symbolic thought: large enough symbolic thought can simulate NNs and vice versa. Indeed even the fact that NNs are soft and fuzzy does not matter theoretically, it's easy to show logical circuits can simulate soft and fuzzy boundaries (in fact, that's how NNs are implemented in real hardware! as binary logic circuits). But I think specific problems have varying degrees of more natural formulation as arithmetic, probabilistic, linear or fuzzy logic, on one hand, and binary, boolean-like logic on the other. Or natural formulations could involve arbitrary mixes of them.

(2) As humans, the actual definitions (although they may be said to exist in a certain way at a given time[1]) vary with time. We can, and do, invent new stuff all the time, and often extend or reuse old concepts. For example, I believe the word 'plug' in english likely well predates modern age, probably used to refer to original electrical power connectors. Nowadays there are USB plugs, which may not carry power at all, or audio plugs, etc. (maybe there are better examples). In any case the pioneer(s) usually did not envision all a name could be used for, and uses evolve.

(3) Words are used as tools to allow communication and, crucially, thought. There comes a need to put a fence (or maybe a mark) in abstract conceptual and logic space, and we associate that with a word. Really a word could be "anything we want to communicate", represent anything. In particular changes to the states of our minds, and states themselves. That's usually too general, most words are probably nouns which represent classifications of objects that exist in the world (like the mentioned chair) -- the 'mind state' definition is probably general enough to cover words like 'sadness', 'amazement', etc., and 'mind state transitions' probably can account for everything else.

We use words (and associated concepts) to dramatically reduce the complexity of the world to enable or improve planning. We can then simplify our tasks into a vastly simpler logical plan: even something simple like put shoes, open door, go outside, take train, get to work -- without segmenting the world into things and concepts (it's hard to even imagine thought without using concepts at all -- it probably happens instinctively), the number of possibilities involved in planning and acting would be overwhelming.

Obligatory article about this: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-ma...

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Now this puts into perspective the work of formalizing things, in particular concepts. If you're formalizing concepts to create a system like Cyc, and expect it to be cheap, simple, reliable, and function well into the future, by our observations that should fail. However, formalization is still possible, even if expensive, complex, and possibly ever changing.

There are still reasons you may want to formalize things, in particular to acquire a deeper understanding of those things, or when you're okay in creating definitions set in stone because they will be confined to a group being attentive and restrictive to their formal definitions (and not, as natural language, evolving organically according to convenience): that's the case with mathematics. The peano axioms still define the same natural numbers; and although names may be reused, you can usually specify them to a particular axiomatic definition that will never change. And thus we can keep building facts on those foundations forever -- while what is a 'plug' in natural language might change (and associated facts about plugs become invalid), we can define mathematical objects (like 'natural numbers') with unchanging properties, and ever-valid and potentially ever-growing valid facts to be known about them, reliably. So fixing concepts in stone more or less (at least when it comes to a particular axiomatization) is not such a foolish endeavor it may look like, quite the opposite! Science in general benefits from those solid foundations.

I think eventually even some concepts related to human emotions and specially ethics will be (with varying degrees of rigor) formalized to be better understood. Which doesn't mean human language should (or will) stop evolving and being fuzzy, it can do so independently of formal more rigid counterparts. Both aspects are useful.

[1] In the sense that, at a given time, you could (theoretically) spend an enormous effort to arrive at a giant rule system that would probably satisfy most people, and most objects referred to as chairs, at a given fixed time.