To be clear I think this probably emotionally harms most humans, but ultimately it’s that’s up to whatever interpretations and emotional beliefs that person has (which are all flexible, in principle).
The counter thought would be that there are different dimensions of the membrane that extend over parts of the world. For example part of my membranes extend over the things I care about, and things that affect my survival.
Yes
The question then becomes how to quantify these different membranes and in terms of interacting with other systems how they can be helpful to you without harming or disturbing these other membranes.
If I understand what you’re saying (and I may not)- yes, this
right, which translates into, it’s not a uniform integral, there’s some sort of weighting.
but I don’t retract my argument that the moral value of my relationship with my friend means that me and my friend acting together as a friendship means that the friendship has a membrane. How familiar are you with social network analysis? if not very, I’d suggest speedwatching at least the first half hour of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZHuj8uBinM which should take 15m at 2x speed. I suggest this because of the way the explanation and the visual intuitions give a framework for reasoning about networks of people.
we also need to somehow take into account when membranes dissipate but this isn’t a failure according to the individual beings.
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.
Huh interesting.
To be clear I think this probably emotionally harms most humans, but ultimately it’s that’s up to whatever interpretations and emotional beliefs that person has (which are all flexible, in principle).
Yes
If I understand what you’re saying (and I may not)- yes, this
if I and my friend work together well, aren’t we an aggregate being that has a new membrane that needs protecting?
from the post:
Many membranes (ie: many possible Markov blankets if you could observe them all) are not valued, empirically.
right, which translates into, it’s not a uniform integral, there’s some sort of weighting.
but I don’t retract my argument that the moral value of my relationship with my friend means that me and my friend acting together as a friendship means that the friendship has a membrane. How familiar are you with social network analysis? if not very, I’d suggest speedwatching at least the first half hour of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZHuj8uBinM which should take 15m at 2x speed. I suggest this because of the way the explanation and the visual intuitions give a framework for reasoning about networks of people.
we also need to somehow take into account when membranes dissipate but this isn’t a failure according to the individual beings.
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?