I guess the answer is memetic, but I don’t see a coherent way to define the difference; both memes and genes are layouts of chemicals, and both are spread by extracting the shape of those chemicals and spreading them through representations encoded in other chemicals. I expect I will eventually optimize my genetic fitness by converting the form of the genes into equivalent behaviors on a computer, at some point, and in the process of doing so, it is very important to me that I ensure that I am maintaining something equivalent to genetic fitness. If adaptations are lost in the process, or if it causes out-of-domain issues, then I will have failed.
Maybe my perspective on this is broken somehow though. Here’s why I have such a hard time with the idea that they’re separate: When I look at my neurons in a hippocampus rendering, and zoom in on nested brain image, I’m modeling a 3d representation of the local “internet” connectivity of the brain (it’s a good metaphor as latencies between brain regions are on par with internet latencies). those messages activate genetically defined behaviors, then over to some other neurons, where they activate genetic behaviors, then over to yet more neurons; at this point we can be quite confident that fairly significant amounts of human preference knowledge is encoded in the genome in ways that keep being used after learning has occurred, despite that the genome only has very compressed protein-algorithm level encodings of the knowledge. Another way to see this comparison is Michal Levin’s bioelectricity research and the implications it has that cells have complex runtime communication systems encoded in genetic state machines that do significant amounts of branching at runtime. In other words, the available state trajectories of my brain are heavily mediated by activation of genome-level representations. While there are some genome-level things I might want to change using advanced reflection technology, as a whole, my goal appears to be to optimize inclusive gene+memetic fitness.
So, I guess my point is that memetic fitness appears to me to very strongly and unavoidably require also maintaining genetic fitness. it is the aggregate phenotype that I want to preserve, and unlike many here, I don’t see that as extricable from the behaviors my current substrate defines. I wouldn’t be the same person if simulated imprecisely, and if it’s a precise enough simulation, then my shape has not been lost, and none of the genetic-ish-seeming error checks I can find in my head seem to have a problem with getting folded and knotted into weird shapes as long as we’re reconstructable into an exact replica. Teleportation is fine, if it really works.
I guess the answer is memetic, but I don’t see a coherent way to define the difference; both memes and genes are layouts of chemicals, and both are spread by extracting the shape of those chemicals and spreading them through representations encoded in other chemicals. I expect I will eventually optimize my genetic fitness by converting the form of the genes into equivalent behaviors on a computer, at some point, and in the process of doing so, it is very important to me that I ensure that I am maintaining something equivalent to genetic fitness. If adaptations are lost in the process, or if it causes out-of-domain issues, then I will have failed.
Maybe my perspective on this is broken somehow though. Here’s why I have such a hard time with the idea that they’re separate: When I look at my neurons in a hippocampus rendering, and zoom in on nested brain image, I’m modeling a 3d representation of the local “internet” connectivity of the brain (it’s a good metaphor as latencies between brain regions are on par with internet latencies). those messages activate genetically defined behaviors, then over to some other neurons, where they activate genetic behaviors, then over to yet more neurons; at this point we can be quite confident that fairly significant amounts of human preference knowledge is encoded in the genome in ways that keep being used after learning has occurred, despite that the genome only has very compressed protein-algorithm level encodings of the knowledge. Another way to see this comparison is Michal Levin’s bioelectricity research and the implications it has that cells have complex runtime communication systems encoded in genetic state machines that do significant amounts of branching at runtime. In other words, the available state trajectories of my brain are heavily mediated by activation of genome-level representations. While there are some genome-level things I might want to change using advanced reflection technology, as a whole, my goal appears to be to optimize inclusive gene+memetic fitness.
So, I guess my point is that memetic fitness appears to me to very strongly and unavoidably require also maintaining genetic fitness. it is the aggregate phenotype that I want to preserve, and unlike many here, I don’t see that as extricable from the behaviors my current substrate defines. I wouldn’t be the same person if simulated imprecisely, and if it’s a precise enough simulation, then my shape has not been lost, and none of the genetic-ish-seeming error checks I can find in my head seem to have a problem with getting folded and knotted into weird shapes as long as we’re reconstructable into an exact replica. Teleportation is fine, if it really works.