What you are gesturing at is how to identify an embedded agent in “the real world”, as far as I can tell. Then you keep asking deeper questions, like “what are these laws of physics”.
So, let’s start from the basic assumptions, let me know if they make sense to you.
Assumption: there is a universe of which we are a small part (hence “embedded agency”). Basically “something exists”.
Assumption: from the point of view of Laplace’s demon, we are identifiable and persistent features of the world, not Boltzmann brains.
Note that at this point we have not assumed the existence of “time” or any other familiar abstraction in our mental map. Just “externally identifiable structures”.
Also note that the world might be a completely random instance of whatever. A bunch of rocks. You can even find loose patterns in white noise if you look hard enough. I wrote a couple of posts about it some years ago:
Now, if we assume that this world contains something externally identifiable as “agents”, it implies another very strong assumption: internal predictability. This is usually glossed over, but this point is crucial, and restricts possible worlds quite a bit. Again, it is a very very very strong constraint. The world must be such that some relevant large scale features of it can be found inside an incredibly tiny part of it. I do not necessarily mean “spatially tiny”. We have not assumed the existence of space yet. Just that there are small subsets of the whole thing that have identifiable (at least to a Laplace demon) features of the whole thing.
Now, given this assumption, you can talk about the world being usefully lossily compressible, to an extremely large degree. “Usefully” here means that the compressed image of the world can fit into an agent and can be traced to be “used” by the agent. Actually the meaning of “usefully” and “used” is a separate can of worms deserving much more than a couple of sentences.
Now, at this point we got “physical laws”: the distillation of the compression algorithm that fits into the agent. For some agents (bacteria) it is “identify sugar gradients and eat your way up the gradient”. For others it is “quantum field theory that predicts the mass of the Higgs boson, given what we can measure”.
This is a crucial point. The world does not come with “matter” and “laws” separately. Physical laws are agent-size distillations of the world, and they are compatible but not unique, and depend on the agent.
To recap, the chain of reasoning about the world goes like this: Something exists → we exist in this “something” → for us to persist the “something” must be compressible → these compression algorithms are physical laws (and sometimes moral laws, or legal laws).
So when you say “brains exist as reifications of brains.” what you probably mean is “the world is predictable from the inside”.
Sort of. It depends on whether every random instance has useful approximate patterns. I do not know the answer. One of my linked posts points at how order can be found in complete randomness.
What you are gesturing at is how to identify an embedded agent in “the real world”, as far as I can tell. Then you keep asking deeper questions, like “what are these laws of physics”.
So, let’s start from the basic assumptions, let me know if they make sense to you.
Assumption: there is a universe of which we are a small part (hence “embedded agency”). Basically “something exists”.
Assumption: from the point of view of Laplace’s demon, we are identifiable and persistent features of the world, not Boltzmann brains.
Note that at this point we have not assumed the existence of “time” or any other familiar abstraction in our mental map. Just “externally identifiable structures”.
Also note that the world might be a completely random instance of whatever. A bunch of rocks. You can even find loose patterns in white noise if you look hard enough. I wrote a couple of posts about it some years ago:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aCuahwMSvbAsToK22/physics-has-laws-the-universe-might-not
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2FZxTKTAtDs2bnfCh/order-from-randomness-ordering-the-universe-of-random
Now, if we assume that this world contains something externally identifiable as “agents”, it implies another very strong assumption: internal predictability. This is usually glossed over, but this point is crucial, and restricts possible worlds quite a bit. Again, it is a very very very strong constraint. The world must be such that some relevant large scale features of it can be found inside an incredibly tiny part of it. I do not necessarily mean “spatially tiny”. We have not assumed the existence of space yet. Just that there are small subsets of the whole thing that have identifiable (at least to a Laplace demon) features of the whole thing.
Now, given this assumption, you can talk about the world being usefully lossily compressible, to an extremely large degree. “Usefully” here means that the compressed image of the world can fit into an agent and can be traced to be “used” by the agent. Actually the meaning of “usefully” and “used” is a separate can of worms deserving much more than a couple of sentences.
Now, at this point we got “physical laws”: the distillation of the compression algorithm that fits into the agent. For some agents (bacteria) it is “identify sugar gradients and eat your way up the gradient”. For others it is “quantum field theory that predicts the mass of the Higgs boson, given what we can measure”.
This is a crucial point. The world does not come with “matter” and “laws” separately. Physical laws are agent-size distillations of the world, and they are compatible but not unique, and depend on the agent.
To recap, the chain of reasoning about the world goes like this: Something exists → we exist in this “something” → for us to persist the “something” must be compressible → these compression algorithms are physical laws (and sometimes moral laws, or legal laws).
So when you say “brains exist as reifications of brains.” what you probably mean is “the world is predictable from the inside”.
In your vocabulary, it comes with matter and compressibility.
Sort of. It depends on whether every random instance has useful approximate patterns. I do not know the answer. One of my linked posts points at how order can be found in complete randomness.