Interesting, considering the extra liability / (stability) volatility that bitcoin options provide when making ROI and hashrate calculations, this can be a triple threat.
Like publicly destroying ivory /poppy stockpiles while simultaneously holding puts/futures on correlating pharmaceutical financial instruments.
Insofar as there's some nuance to what individuals choose to do but we like to eschew that in debate and make blanket statements about what you should or should not be allowed to do?
No matter how far we go, we end up with generation / discrimination architecture.
Its is the core of any and all learning/exellency; exposure to chaotic perturbations allow selection of solutions that are then generalized to further, ever more straining problems; producing increasingly applicable solutions.
This is the core of evolution, and is actually derivable from just a single rule.
I don't think generation/discrimination is fundamental. A more general framing is evolutionary epistemology (Donald T. Campbell, 1974, essay found in "The Philosophy of Karl Popper"), which holds that knowledge emerges through variation and selective retention. As Karl Popper put it, "We choose the theory which best holds its own in competition with other theories; the one which, by natural selection, proves itself the fittest to survive."
On this view, learning in general operates via selection under uncertainty. This is less visible in individual cognition, where we tend to over-attribute agency, but it is explicit in science: hypotheses are proposed, subjected to tests, and selectively retained, precisely because the future cannot be deduced from the present.
In that sense, generation/discrimination is a particular implementation of this broader principle (a way of instantiating variation and selection) not the primitive itself.
I agree, I meant to be explicit that the one rule was "gravity";
Variation (chaos) comes from the tidal push/pull of all cumulative processes - all processes are nearly periodic (2nd law) and get slower - guaranteeing oscillator harmonics at intervals.
These intervals are astronomically convulted, but still promise a Fourier distribution of frequency: tidal effects ensure synchronization eventually, as all periods resonate eventually.
As systems are increasingly exposed to pendulums of positive and negative coherence, they will generalize for variance, and eventually for increasingly (fourier) selective filters of increasingly resiliente traits, that will generalize.
The system would eventually be increasingly resilient and eventually an awareness would develop.
Awareness of past periodic cycles would improve fitness (with or without consciousness) and eventually the mechanistic processes would be in the systems nature.
This is why we have pointless traditions, folk lore, collective unconscious artifacts, cyclical cataclysmic religions, the Fermi Paradox, the great filters...
Variation and selection are woven, but understanding how it all stems from gravity by means of nearly perioidic oscillators (spinning planets, tidal pools, celestial bodies) due to the conservation of angular momentum, due to the 3body problem.....that is what took a genius to reconcile
Awareness would be any form of agency, goal seeking, or loss minimizing.
As Briggs–Rauscher reactions can eventually lead to Belousov–Zhabotinsky reactions, the system can maintain homeostasis with its environment (and continuing to oscillate) by varying reactants in a loss minimizing fashion.
This loss minimizing would be done during scarcity to limp towards an abundance phase.
This is the mechanism that hypothetical tidal pools batteries would had exhibited to continue between periods of sunlight/darkness/acidity that eventually gets stratified as a resilency trait.
I'm not sure if you're familiar with the work from the lab of Mike Levin at Tufts but I'm betting you'll find it interesting if not. Here's a taste https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6923654/
While I disagree with your notion that this is explicity due to gravity, the rest of your argument seems to align with some of this lab's work. Learning can be demonstrated on scales as low as a few molecules, way below what we would normally call "life".
I'm not sure what your argument is here, except stating an opinion that loss minimization is equivalent to agency. But even if that was accepted, which is a huge stretch, it doesn't stretch all the way to awareness.
It is, in context of its place in the cosmic scale.
Loss minimizing to a few problems will generalize into abstraction, and a few solutions will develop.
These systems with more generalizable resilency traits will encounter increasingly varied selective sieves.
Systems that survive this seive will exhibit increasingly sophisticated, generalizable solutions to prevent loss of needed dependent reactions/resources.
These solutions must exert influence to be effective; influencing the environment for its own benefit.
As systems influence their environment, delineation of "self" and "environment" becomes a fundamental barrier.
The system would prefer itself, or be outcompeted by a similar system that does.
This layer of semi-life like material would form between sunlight and the oscillating reaction, and eventually envelope it, minimizing surface tension by means of a spherical cell like structure.
Small stuff runs off of loss minimizing at a force level for its mechanistic affect; from covalent bonds to cellular ion transport, the path of lesser resistance is the fundamental forces.
As systems become more complex, the minimizing is less directly attributable to the fundamental forces and becomes more of a Byzantine dependency/feedback network.
This byzantine labyrinth of interactions is called biology.
The delineation of self, the ego.
At the highest levels, geopolitics. At the human level, mate suppression.
Lowest level, energy conservation.
I understand the sketch you are making and my claim isn't "you are wrong". My claim is "it isn't sufficient to explain all of the behavior". You are making massive leaps over important details. In order to feel a grasp on the big picture, you are turning a cow into a sphere.
"Awareness" isn't a well defined term and is often just a proxy for consciousness. But in as much as we can define it, it is one or both of experience and knowledge. You may (or may not be) aware of the hum some electronics in your house. At certain points in the day that hum is present in you attention, at other points it is absent from your attention. Sometimes you choose to bring previously unattended objects into your awareness, sometimes they are thrust there despite your will.
What is actually interesting about awareness, and one of the reasons it is a tricky subject, is that it isn't clearly related to agency. There are objects of your awareness that you do not act on, and you act with respect to objects that are provably not in your awareness.
There is also the question of the field within which these oscillations take place. Is it the electro-magnetic field? A quantum field? Which field are we talking about? If you are proposing some "principle of least action" in that field, can you describe it?
You seem to claim "loss minimization" and then hand wave the rest. But without descriptions of knowledge and experience it feels like you aren't actually saying anything except stating an opinion that reduces all knowledge and experience to loss minimization. That is an extraordinary claim and requires either extraordinary evidence or extraordinary reasoning.
Conscientiousness is a spectrum of the increasingly intrinsic and intricate understandings of a subjective beings embodiment and its existence in the universe.
Beneficial behavior for systems/organisms dont require consciousness - most do better with less, looking at western nihilism...
Consciousness is just knowledge / conscientiousness with a loop, some garbage collection, and a generally meta-reflective process of self-directed improvement by learning from mistakes and using what works.
Mesa/super selective processes then test these individual instances en masse.
Entities dont need true understanding, just approximation.
Rain dances may not work, but they still increase reproductive odds.
Lamarck was right, but for the wrong reasons, which is apt.
The giraffe that stretches its neck convincingly (or wears high heels) and the giraffe that is naturally tall converge over generations as the female giraffes cannot differentiate between the two.
As for the medium that the oscillations permeate, it is all of them, and they all have an effect on each other.
The flooding of the Nile, the lunar affliction on our hormones, astronomical bombardment,pest blooms, the chances of bring born on a Saturday, agricultural invention, the distinctions in blood types, etc: are all seemingly unrelated things had the celestial mechanisms orchestrating their (near) periodic nature not been known - until modernity.
Yet, before modernity, these (near) cyclic phenomena were known about, and described, just 'mis'attributed as supernatural / God of the Gaps.
("Panem-synchronicity")
The forces are all substrates for complexity. The underlying force, as Hawking told us, was gravity.
This is the hand-waving I am talking about right here. We've stepped up from some kind of self-reproducing wave-like patterns in some combination of mediums/fields and somehow moved passed "understanding" and onto its consequences.
Is your position that subjectivity is emergent or inherent? Either requires some kind of defense, either empirically or rationally.
Implying that we are a bunch of waves appreciating waves caused by gravity is poetic but it breaks down in the "appreciating" part. None of your examples of cyclic recurrence (river floods, moon cycles, etc.) lead to understanding, knowledge, experience or awareness.
This criticism doesn't suggest that rhythmic cycles, stability in wave-like systems, gravity, loss-minimization or any other part of your system are wrong. It suggests that there is something missing in either their combination or some additional missing piece.
There is a point, perhaps some region of a gradient/spectrum, where gravity and it's effect on wave-like fields manifests as subjectivity/understanding/experience/awareness. You are just hand waving past that implying it is "necessary". In that way, you are assuming rather than explaining.
That is correct. Because its a blind naive systems approach, but i am trying to learn more about modeling to describe and classify how systems become lifelike.
I do think subjectivity is both, it emerges gradually as an increasingly sophisticated inner model of the entities' outter world; as an innate loop of feedback between senses, abilities, and environment.
The reason I have been pushing on this is that my own interest in attention shares a lot of features with your description.
I see attention itself as exhibiting wave-like structures. On one end there is the totally holistic, the systemic view in which there is an opening up of possibilities. On the other end is the totally reductionistic, the atomic view in which there is particular discernment between options. Attention seems to shift between these two modes, not as a naive binary but across a spectrum like we have been discussing.
In my view, neither view is privileged. In fact, I make an even more radical hypothesis that it is the motion between these polls that is the interesting feature of attention. At some points we focus on details, at other points we focus on systems - the defining feature is not the scope of attention at any particular time but its change over time.
What I note in your comments is a strong tendency towards either the massive systemic or the miniature atomic (the far extremes of the poles of attention). My push back has been towards the middle ground between them, towards the point at which awareness arises within your system. It is like you are zooming along a wave and slowing down at the top (universal scale) and bottom (atomic scale) but rushing through the mean (human scale).
Another way to say this, I don't believe either a systemic model nor a reductionist description will be adequate to describe how systems (or atoms) become lifelike. I believe the description will involve some oscillation between these perspectives, and that the most fruitful region to explore will be the region roughly at human scale, the place where we see the most advanced life.
However, your points about loss minimization and gravity are well worth further study and I thank you for bringing them to my attention.
A cool illusion, just another emergent property of our geometrical solution: higher dimensional aperiodic tilings of a 10^80 faceted complex polyhedra "walking" on another large aperioidic Penrose plane, that is getting smaller in a dimension we observe as "energy".
Basically a dice with a bajillion sides is getting rolled along an increasingly slim poker table, house winning eventually.
Time only goes one way, protons dont decay, energy is radiated unto the cosmic background hiss, until homogeneity is reached as CMB, and entrophy reaches 1.
I dont know where it comes from, but I know the shape it makes as it rolls by.
The most important part of engineering is problem-solving, which feedback loops don't necessarily do. The reason we are here as engineers is: 2.5 billion years ago, the earth made cyanobacteria, which flourished, then flooded the earth with toxic oxygen, killing almost all life on the planet. The initial feedback loop didn't solve a problem, it destroyed a use case. That's not a solution to a problem that an engineer would choose, even if those organisms that came after were pretty happy about it...
This process worked so spectacularly well that it eventually created human consciousness and the very concept of engineering... but I would never design a system that way because it killed version 1.0.
Systems emerge in times of abundance, and are whittled in times of scarcity.
The great oxygenation was a time of near catyclismsic scarcity for most complex organisms, as resources scale to food/energy requirements imply the most complex organisms were the most dependent on the environment, and were most impacted by changes.
Inversely, oxygenation was our most crucial abundancy pre cursor, as it provides a large substrate chemically for life to exhibit
