Agreed we would have to talk more. I think I mostly get the homunculi objection. Don’t have time now to write an actual response, so here are some signposts: - part of what you call agency is explained by roughly active inference style of reasoning —some type of “living” system is characteristic by having boundaries between them and the environment (boundaries mostly in sense of separation of variables) -- maintaining the boundary leads to need to model the environment —modelling the environment introduces a selection pressure toward approximating Bayes - other critical ingredient is boundedness —in this universe, negentropy isn’t free —this introduces fundamental tradeoff / selection pressure for any cognitive system: length isn’t free, bitflips aren’t free, etc. (--- downstream of that is compression everywhere, abstractions) -- empirically, the cost/returns function for scaling cognition usually hits diminishing returns, leading to minds where it’s not effective to grow the single mind further —this leads to the basin of convergent evolution I call “specialize and trade”— empirically, for many cognitive systems, there is a general selection pressure toward modularity —I don’t know what are all the reasons for that, but one relatively simple is ‘wires are not free’; if wires are not free, you get colocation of computations like brain regions or industry hubs —other possibilities are selection pressures from CAP theorem, MVG, … (modularity also looks a bit like box-inverted specialize and trade)
So, in short, I think where I agree with the spirit of If humans didn’t have a fixed skull size, you wouldn’t get civilization with specialized members and my response is there seems to be extremely general selection pressure in this direction. If cells were able to just grow in size and it was efficient, you wouldn’t get multicellulars. If code bases were able to just grow in size and it was efficient, I wouldn’t get a myriad of packages on my laptop, it would all be just kernel. (But even if it was just kernel, it seems modularity would kick in and you still get the ‘distinguishable parts’ structure.)
Agreed we would have to talk more. I think I mostly get the homunculi objection. Don’t have time now to write an actual response, so here are some signposts:
- part of what you call agency is explained by roughly active inference style of reasoning
—some type of “living” system is characteristic by having boundaries between them and the environment (boundaries mostly in sense of separation of variables)
-- maintaining the boundary leads to need to model the environment
—modelling the environment introduces a selection pressure toward approximating Bayes
- other critical ingredient is boundedness
—in this universe, negentropy isn’t free
—this introduces fundamental tradeoff / selection pressure for any cognitive system: length isn’t free, bitflips aren’t free, etc.
(--- downstream of that is compression everywhere, abstractions)
-- empirically, the cost/returns function for scaling cognition usually hits diminishing returns, leading to minds where it’s not effective to grow the single mind further
—this leads to the basin of convergent evolution I call “specialize and trade”—
empirically, for many cognitive systems, there is a general selection pressure toward modularity
—I don’t know what are all the reasons for that, but one relatively simple is ‘wires are not free’; if wires are not free, you get colocation of computations like brain regions or industry hubs
—other possibilities are selection pressures from CAP theorem, MVG, …
(modularity also looks a bit like box-inverted specialize and trade)
So, in short, I think where I agree with the spirit of If humans didn’t have a fixed skull size, you wouldn’t get civilization with specialized members and my response is there seems to be extremely general selection pressure in this direction. If cells were able to just grow in size and it was efficient, you wouldn’t get multicellulars. If code bases were able to just grow in size and it was efficient, I wouldn’t get a myriad of packages on my laptop, it would all be just kernel. (But even if it was just kernel, it seems modularity would kick in and you still get the ‘distinguishable parts’ structure.)