I agree, generally, but I’ve got a quibble with your last paragraph. I’m tentatively in agreement that stars are not, qua stars, optimization processes, but I’m less certain that stars do not contain optimization processes. And I’m tentatively certain that stars are the products of strong optimization pressures; how likely is star formation? Doesn’t cosmological/astronomical evolution (i.e. the ‘rules’ by which it occurs) count as a (powerful) form of selection? There are innumerable dust clouds in the visible universe that never became stars.
Have you read ‘A New Kind of Science’ (yes, it’s a pretentious title) by Stephen Wolfram? He has a number of interesting discussions of intelligence. Your recent posts re: intelligence and optimization processes remind me of Wolfram’s statement (I’m greatly paraphrasing) that a sufficiently general definition of intelligence (in terms of information processing and something akin to your optimization processes) would necessarily include all kinds of entities that we would not categorize as intentional.
Stars are a strictly accidental, natural formation given gravity and non-homogenous, sufficiently large gas clouds. That’s that.
Nuclear computing is a whole different matter. If you can overcome the thermodynamic activity at upwards of 15 billion kelvin, then it is definitely a possibility. Personally I would assign higher probability to concentric dyson-sphere brains.
I’m curious what you think about this after reading these 17 pages from the book I mentioned. The point I was making relied on the idea (or perspective) that everything already is computing. The point then being that the physical processes within stars might be sufficiently advanced computationally that they could be considered, in some sense, intelligent.
I agree, generally, but I’ve got a quibble with your last paragraph. I’m tentatively in agreement that stars are not, qua stars, optimization processes, but I’m less certain that stars do not contain optimization processes. And I’m tentatively certain that stars are the products of strong optimization pressures; how likely is star formation? Doesn’t cosmological/astronomical evolution (i.e. the ‘rules’ by which it occurs) count as a (powerful) form of selection? There are innumerable dust clouds in the visible universe that never became stars.
Have you read ‘A New Kind of Science’ (yes, it’s a pretentious title) by Stephen Wolfram? He has a number of interesting discussions of intelligence. Your recent posts re: intelligence and optimization processes remind me of Wolfram’s statement (I’m greatly paraphrasing) that a sufficiently general definition of intelligence (in terms of information processing and something akin to your optimization processes) would necessarily include all kinds of entities that we would not categorize as intentional.
Stars are a strictly accidental, natural formation given gravity and non-homogenous, sufficiently large gas clouds. That’s that.
Nuclear computing is a whole different matter. If you can overcome the thermodynamic activity at upwards of 15 billion kelvin, then it is definitely a possibility. Personally I would assign higher probability to concentric dyson-sphere brains.
I’m curious what you think about this after reading these 17 pages from the book I mentioned. The point I was making relied on the idea (or perspective) that everything already is computing. The point then being that the physical processes within stars might be sufficiently advanced computationally that they could be considered, in some sense, intelligent.
Intelligence is optimization power. Boltzmann brains don’t have a lot.