groups working together to be an interaction have a aggregate meta-membrane: for any given group who are participating in an interaction of some kind, the fact of their connection is a property of {the mutual information of some variables about their locations and actions or something} that makes them act as a semicoherent shared being, and we call that shared being “a friendship”, “a romance”, “a family”, “a party”, “a talk”, “an event”, “a company”, “a coop”, “a neighborhood”, “a city”, etc etc etc. each of these will have a different level of membrane defense depending on how much the participants in the thing act to preserve it. in each case, we can recognize some unreliable pattern of membrane defense. typically the membrane gets stretched through communication tubes, I think? consider how loss of internet feels like something cutting a stretched membrane that was connecting you.
...this is why I’d expect to need an integral over possible membranes, and the thing we’d need to do to make this perspective useful is find some sturdy, causal-graph information-theoretic metric that reliably identifies agents. compare discovering agents
this seems like an obvious consequence of not getting to specify “organism” in any straightforward way; we have to somehow information theoretically specify something that will simultaneously identify bacteria and organisms, and then we need some sort of weighting that naturally recognizes individual humans. those should end up getting the majority of the weight in the integral, of course, but it shouldn’t need to be hardcoded.
could you restate your argument again plainly i missed it
groups working together to be an interaction have a aggregate meta-membrane: for any given group who are participating in an interaction of some kind, the fact of their connection is a property of {the mutual information of some variables about their locations and actions or something} that makes them act as a semicoherent shared being, and we call that shared being “a friendship”, “a romance”, “a family”, “a party”, “a talk”, “an event”, “a company”, “a coop”, “a neighborhood”, “a city”, etc etc etc. each of these will have a different level of membrane defense depending on how much the participants in the thing act to preserve it. in each case, we can recognize some unreliable pattern of membrane defense. typically the membrane gets stretched through communication tubes, I think? consider how loss of internet feels like something cutting a stretched membrane that was connecting you.
this seems like an obvious consequence of not getting to specify “organism” in any straightforward way; we have to somehow information theoretically specify something that will simultaneously identify bacteria and organisms, and then we need some sort of weighting that naturally recognizes individual humans. those should end up getting the majority of the weight in the integral, of course, but it shouldn’t need to be hardcoded.
Oh.
But why shouldn’t it be hardcoded?
well maybe it can be as a backstop but what about, idk, dogs? or just humans that aren’t in the protected group, eg people outside a state?