This is a post about the mystery of agency. It sets up a thought experiment in which we consider a completely deterministic environment that operates according to very simple rules, and ask what it would be for an agentic entity to exist within that.
People in the game of life community actually spent some time investigating the empirical questions that were raised in this post. Dave Greene notes:
The technology for clearing random ash out of a region of space isn’t entirely proven yet, but it’s looking a lot more likely than it was a year ago, that a workable “space-cleaning” mechanism could exist in Conway’s Life.
As previous comments have pointed out, it certainly wouldn’t be absolutely foolproof. But it might be surprisingly reliable at clearing out large volumes of settled random ash—which could very well enable a 99+% success rate for a Very Very Slow Huge-Smiley-Face Constructor.
I have the sense that the most important question raised in this post is about whether it is possible to construct a relatively small object in the physical world that steers the configuration of a relatively large region of the physical world into a desired configuration. The Game of Life analogy is intended to make that primary question concrete, and also to highlight how fundamental the question of such an object’s existence is.
The main point of this post was that the feasibility or non-feasibility of AI systems that exert precise influence over regions of space much larger than themselves may actually be a basic kind of descriptive principle for the physical world. It would be great to write a follow-up post highlighting this point.
This is a post about the mystery of agency. It sets up a thought experiment in which we consider a completely deterministic environment that operates according to very simple rules, and ask what it would be for an agentic entity to exist within that.
People in the game of life community actually spent some time investigating the empirical questions that were raised in this post. Dave Greene notes:
I have the sense that the most important question raised in this post is about whether it is possible to construct a relatively small object in the physical world that steers the configuration of a relatively large region of the physical world into a desired configuration. The Game of Life analogy is intended to make that primary question concrete, and also to highlight how fundamental the question of such an object’s existence is.
The main point of this post was that the feasibility or non-feasibility of AI systems that exert precise influence over regions of space much larger than themselves may actually be a basic kind of descriptive principle for the physical world. It would be great to write a follow-up post highlighting this point.