Hi Ben,
I've just read: Science, Probability and Human Nature: A
Sociological/ Computational/ Probabilist Philosophy of Science. It's
accessible (thanks) and very thought provoking.
As I read the paper, I imagined how these questions might relate to the
creation and training and activities of Novamentes.
Coming out of my own work I've also been thinking about how
Novamentes might deal with the issue of ecological sustainability. This
question then links up with some of the ideas in your paper.
You mentioned that key attributes of people (and perhaps also
Novamentes?) who are likely to contribute most to the development of
science is an interest in 'novelty' and 'simplicity' of theories (in the
Einsteinian sense of as simple as possible, but no simpler?). This
was counterposed to people who seek 'stability' and 'persistence'.
For a while I've been thinking that AGIs should have an inbuilt value of
caution in the face of possibilities to change the real world (a
precautionary principle). But in the light of your paper it occurred to me
that you might see such a principle as predisposing AGIs to a
personality of seeking stability and persistence and hence you might
not be so keen on the idea of an inbuilt precautionary principle.
In my own work I've been trying to work out how to handle
simultaneous drives for continuity and change. I think these lie at the
heart of the notion of 'sustainable development'.
I think a balanced personality needs to have both drives - to identify
what needs to or is desirable to persist from the present into the future
and what needs to or is desirable to be changed for the better (for the
first time). Perhaps then wisdom lies in the ability to decide what
should be managed for continuity and what for change and what can be
left to survive or not as an outcome of the evolution of the system.
So maybe the challenge is not to priviledge a drive for stability and
persistence over an drive for novelty and change - or vice versa, but to
enable people and AGIs to have *both* sub-personalities but have a
system for applying these sub-personalities to different key issues.
This then pushes the debate onto the question of what guides us to
prefer to actively sustain versus to actively change in relation to
different issues or questions.
Cheers, Philip
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