Wednesday, February 12, 2003, 11:18:50 PM, Shane Legg wrote: SL> Cliff Stabbert wrote:
CS> What I'm getting at is an attempt at an external definition or at CS> least telltale of conscious behaviour as either "that which is not CS> compressible" or "that which although apparently compressible for some CS> period, suddenly changes later" or perhaps "that which is not CS> compressible to less than X% of the original data" where X is some CS> largeish number like 60-90. SL> This seems to be problematic to me. For example, a random string SL> generated by coin flips is not compressible at all so would you SL> say that it's alive? No, although it does take something living to flip the coins; but presumably it's non-random (physically predictable by observing externals) from the moment the coin has been flipped. The decision to call heads or tails however is not at all as *easily* physically predictable, perhaps that's what I'm getting at. But I understand your point about compressibility (expanded below). SL> Back in the mid 90's when complexity theory SL> was cool for a while after chaos theory there was a lot of talk SL> about "the edge of chaos". One way to look at this is to say that SL> alive systems seem to have some kind of a fundamental balance between SL> randomness and extreme compressibility. To me this seems obvious and SL> I have a few ideas on the matter. Many others investigated the subject SL> but as far as I know never got anywhere. Yes, that's what seems interesting to me. Life creates patterns localized in time and space, and as the time- and space- horizons are broadened, the patterns break down to be replaced by different ones. Based on our own history it would appear the patterns get replaced more and more quickly: the tides are more predictable than the behaviour of an ant, the ants are more predictable than a wolf, the wolves are more predictable than a human in 800 B.C., and the human in 800 B.C. is more predictable than the human in 2003 A.D. In that sense, Singularity Theory seems to be a statement of the development of life's (Kolmogorov?) complexity over time. SL> Chaitin, one of the founders of Kolmogorov complexity theory did SL> some similar work some time ago, SL> http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/chaitin79toward.html Thanks for the reference! From the abstract, this is indeed akin to what I was getting at. Might be over my head, see below. CS> The reason I'm thinking in these terms is because I suspected Ockham's CS> razor to relate to the compressibility idea as you stated; and I've SL> Sounds to me like you need to read Li and Vitanyi's book on SL> Kolmogorov complexity theory :) SL> http://www.cwi.nl/~paulv/kolmogorov.html Ah, it looks like I should read this -- both you and James Rogers have referred me to this work. To ask another question: given that I only had math up to differential calculus, and have forgotten most of that, can you recommend (a) good (text)book(s) to get me grounded in the mathematical/information theory concepts necessary to understand the above? Thanks in advance. -- Cliff ------- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?[EMAIL PROTECTED]
