It’s another discussion, really, but it sounds as though you are denying the idea of “interestingness” as a universal instrumental value—whereas I would emphasize that “interestingness” is really just our name for whether something sustains our interest or not—and ‘interest’ is a pretty basic functional property of any agent with mobile sensors. There’ll be other similarities in the area too—such as novelty-seeking. So shared common ground is only to be expected.
Anyway, I am not too wedded to Martian Yudkowsky. The problematical idea is that you could have a nanotech-capable spacefaring civilization that is not “interesting”. If such a thing isn’t “interesting” then—WTF?
So: do you really think that humans wouldn’t find a martian civilization interesting? Surely there would be many humans who would be incredibly interested.
I find Jupiter interesting. I think a paperclip maximizer (choosing a different intuition pump for the same point) could be more interesting than Jupiter, but it would generate an astronomically tiny fraction of the total potential for interestingness in this universe.
Life isn’t much of an “interestingness” maximiser. Expecting to produce more than a tiny fraction of the total potential for interestingness in this universe seems as though it would be rather unreasonable.
I agree that a paperclip maximiser would be more boring than an ordinary entropy-maximising civilization—though I don’t know by how much—probably not by a huge amount—the basic problems it faces are much the same—the paperclip maximiser just has fewer atoms to work with.
It’s another discussion, really, but it sounds as though you are denying the idea of “interestingness” as a universal instrumental value—whereas I would emphasize that “interestingness” is really just our name for whether something sustains our interest or not—and ‘interest’ is a pretty basic functional property of any agent with mobile sensors. There’ll be other similarities in the area too—such as novelty-seeking. So shared common ground is only to be expected.
Anyway, I am not too wedded to Martian Yudkowsky. The problematical idea is that you could have a nanotech-capable spacefaring civilization that is not “interesting”. If such a thing isn’t “interesting” then—WTF?
Yes, I am; I think that the human value of interestingness is much, much more specific than the search space optimization you’re pointing at.
[This reply was to an earlier version of timtyler’s comment]
So: do you really think that humans wouldn’t find a martian civilization interesting? Surely there would be many humans who would be incredibly interested.
I find Jupiter interesting. I think a paperclip maximizer (choosing a different intuition pump for the same point) could be more interesting than Jupiter, but it would generate an astronomically tiny fraction of the total potential for interestingness in this universe.
Life isn’t much of an “interestingness” maximiser. Expecting to produce more than a tiny fraction of the total potential for interestingness in this universe seems as though it would be rather unreasonable.
I agree that a paperclip maximiser would be more boring than an ordinary entropy-maximising civilization—though I don’t know by how much—probably not by a huge amount—the basic problems it faces are much the same—the paperclip maximiser just has fewer atoms to work with.