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Khalil JRM's avatar

Love the creative exercise!

The line “The human was aware of this in advance. He went anyway” took me out.

What strikes me is that this agent seems to have a kind of personality and curiosity, though cold. That of an intelligence scholar. I wonder what this exploration would look like if it were mirroring a different kind of personality and curiosity. But I appreciate the overall point about problematicity being wedded to locatedness/contingency.

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R.B. Griggs's avatar

Ha, very happy that line landed.

I cycled through a bunch of exploration possibilities. Are you thinking a personality that would be more or less machinic?

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Khalil JRM's avatar

My impression is that these systems help us search search spaces, but they are not ‘searchers’.

That search impulse seems to be wedded to the very situatedness or throwness you emphasized at the end.

This is also why I think by themselves they are holo without the ject. We add the ject ingredient.

In that case, the display of curiosity here must be a mirror of a form of our own curiosity. I imagine there are other forms curiosity can take, different objects of curiosity, other than scientific discovery. I am sure that this is somewhat trivial to simulate atleast.

Haven’t really thought further than this. But so much hinges on the Hofstadter-Chalmers achievement I can’t even imagine haha.

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Swami's avatar

Fascinating angle. Itself quite creative!

I think innovation is difficult for us. It’s infinitely easier, safer and more efficient to copy the successful than to try to create something new. So we are great at copying, and not so much at innovation.

The innovation we do get comes more from minor copying mistakes, fiddling, minor variations on a theme, recombination and exporting tested ideas to new domains. And these are of course paths more likely to work.

But I am sure our robot overlords already know this!

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