Go follow Bruce on twitter (https://twitter.com/bnielson01) and check out his Theory of Anything Podcast here.

(Also Vaden's audio was acting up a bit in this episode, we humbly seek forgiveness.)

We discuss

• Does theorem proving count as creativity?
• Is AlphaGo creative?
• Determinism, predictability, and chaos theory
• Essentialism and a misunderstanding of definitions
• Animal memes and understanding
• Turing Machines and computational universality
• Penrose's "proof" that we need new physics

References

• Ask Us Anything I: Computation and Creativity (Listen first!)
• Logic theorist
• AlphaGo movie

Socials

• Follow us on Twitter at @IncrementsPod, @BennyChugg, @VadenMasrani
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Create us up an email with something imaginatively rote, cliche and formulaic, and mail that creative stinker over to incrementspodcast@gmail.com

Special Guest: Bruce Nielson.

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• Is hypnosis a real thing?
• Types of universality contained within the genetic code
• Pressures associated with turning political/philosophical ideas into personal identities
• How do emotions/feelings interface with our rational/logical mind? How should they?
• Vaden's (hopefully one-off) experience with Bipolar Type-1 and psychosis
• Is problem solving the sole purpose of thinking? Vaden says yes (with many caveats!) and Ben says wtf no you fool. Then we argue about how to watch TV.

Questions

1. (Neil Hudson) Are there any theories as to the type of universality achievable via the genetic code (in BOI it is presumed to fall short of coding for all possible life forms)?

2. (Neil Hudson) Wd be gd to get your take on: riffing on the Sperber/Mercier social thesis v. individual, if one is scarce private space/time then the need to constantly avow one’s public identity may “swamp” the critical evaluation of arguments one hears? Goes to seeking truth v status

3. (Arun Kannan) What are your thoughts on inexplicit knowledge (David Deutsch jargon) and more broadly emotions/feelings in the mind ? How do these interplay with explicit ideas / thoughts ? What should we prioritize ? If we don't prioritize one over the other, how to resolve conflicts between them ? Any tips, literature, Popperian wisdom you can share on this ?

4. (Tom Nassis) Is the sole purpose of all forms of thinking problem-solving? Or can thinking have purposes other than solving a problem?

Quotes

Reach always has an explanation. But this time, to the best of my knowledge, the explanation is not yet known. If the reason for the jump in reach was that it was a jump to universality, what was the universality? The genetic code is presumably not universal for specifying life forms, since it relies on specific types of chemicals, such as proteins. Could it be a universal constructor? Perhaps. It does manage to build with inorganic materials sometimes, such as the calcium phosphate in bones, or the magnetite in the navigation system inside a pigeon’s brain. Biotechnologists are already using it to manufacture hydrogen and to extract uranium from seawater. It can also program organisms to perform constructions outside their bodies: birds build nests; beavers build dams. Perhaps it would it be possible to specify, in the genetic code, an organism whose life cycle includes building a nuclear-powered spaceship. Or perhaps not. I guess it has some lesser, and not yet understood, universality.

In 1994 the computer scientist and molecular biologist Leonard Adleman designed and built a computer composed of DNA together with some simple enzymes, and demonstrated that it was capable of performing some sophisticated computations. At the time, Adleman’s DNA computer was arguably the fastest computer in the world. Further, it was clear that a universal classical computer could be made in a similar way. Hence we know that, whatever that other universality of the DNA system was, the universality of computation had also been inherent in it for billions of years, without ever being used – until Adleman used it.

Beginning of Infinity, p.158 (emph added)

References

• Derren brown makes people forget their stop
• Bari Weiss's conversation with Freddie deBoer on psychosis, bipolar, and mental health. This conversation addresses the New York Times article which views having schizophrenia, bipolar, etc as no better or worse than not having schizophrenia, bipolar, etc. Also contains Vaden's favorite euphemism of 2022: "Nonconsensus Realities"
• Sad existentialist cat

Send Vaden an email with a thought you have not designed to solve a problem at incrementspodcast.com

Socials

• Follow us on Twitter at @IncrementsPod, @BennyChugg, @VadenMasrani
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Questions:

1. Hey do you guys have a Patreon page or anyway to support you?
2. (Michael) Not clear that humans are universal explainers. Standard argument for this is "to assume o.w. is to appeal to the supernatural," but this argument is weak b/c it does not explain why humans could in principle explain everything. But all Deutch's ideas rests on this axiom. It's almost tautological - there could be things humans cannot explain, but we wouldn't even know about these things b/c we wouldn't be able to explain them. I think this argument that humans are universal explainers and thus can achieve indefinite progress needs more rigor.It might be a step jump from animals to humans, but why could there not be more step jumps in intelligence beyond human intelligence that we do not even know about? I'd love to get your thoughts on this.
3. (Michael) Another pt I'd love to get your perspectives on is the idea of the "creative program." Standard discussion is "humans are special because we are creative, and we don't know what the creative program is." But we need to make progress on creativity at some point and it kind of feels like we are using the word "creativity" as a vague suitcase word to encapsulate "everything we don't yet know about intelligence." Simply saying "humans are creative" without properly defining what it means to be creative in a way that we can evaluate in machines is not helping us make progress on developing creative AI. It's unsatisfying to hear critiques of AI that say "this AI model is not 'truly intelligent' because it is not creative" without also proposing a way to evaluate its creativity. In this sense, critiques of AI that say AI is "not creative" are bad explanations because these critiques are easy to vary. Without a proposing a proper test for creativity that can actually evaluated, it is not possible for us to conduct a test to refute the critique. I'd love to get your thoughts on how we can construct evaluations for creativity in a way that enables us to make scientific progress on understanding the creative algorithm!

References:

• Episode 9: Introduction to Computational Theory, Theory of Anything podcast
• David Deutsch on Coleman Hughes' podcast: Multiverse of Madness
• John Cleese's excellent new book Creativity

Contact us

• Follow us on Twitter at @IncrementsPod, @BennyChugg, @VadenMasrani
• Check us out on youtube at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_4wZzQyoW4s4ZuE4FY9DQQ
• Come join our discord server! DM us on twitter or send us an email to get a supersecret link

Support
You can support the project on Patreon (monthly donations, https://www.patreon.com/Increments) or Ko-fi (one time donation, https://ko-fi.com/increments). Thank you!

How much explaining could a universal explainer explain if a universal explainer could explain explaining? Tell us at incrementspodcast@gmail.com.

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