I want to compile a list of topics that could help inspire formal/mathematical abstractions for boundaries/membranes. (See my recent explainer.)
What technical topics are related to boundaries/membranes?
I’ve seeded the comments with some ideas. Please keep further comments organized in threads if possible. Also, please add high quality links to existing comments by others.
Scott Garrabrant’s work: Embedded Agency, Cartesian Frames, Finite Factored Sets
Cyborgism(for empowering membranes / making them better at defending themselves)
Also Capabilitarianism
Does anyone have good links for these^?
thx to friend:
Cybernetics
Viable system model
Management cybernetics
Viable systems approach
Markov blankets, active inference, the free energy principle
Related, quantum information theory:
The physical meaning of the Holographic Principle., https://chrisfieldsresearch.com/holo-pub-Quanta-2022.pdf, and many other related papers on Quantum Free Energy Principle at https://chrisfieldsresearch.com/
Oh, yes! I forgot about your original comment about this
Great initiative !
I’ve always been intrigued by Andrew Critch’s suggestion that the problem of commitment races in game theory and other forms of threats may be ‘resolved’ by thinking in terms of boundaries as natural BATNA points
https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/commitment-races
Any link to Critch suggesting this?
Iirc it’s in the original boundaries sequence. Sorry I’m too lazy to look it up.
It’s the part about natural bargaining points and people being able to ‘go home’
The concept of “separation of tasks” from Adlerian Psychology. This is where many of my intuitions originally came from. This isn’t technical though.
Psychology may not be “technical enough” because an adequate mathematical science or process theory is not developed for it, yet, but it’s ultimately very important, perhaps critically important: see the last paragraph of https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AKBkDNeFLZxaMqjQG/gaia-network-a-practical-incremental-pathway-to-open-agency. Davidad apparently thinks that it can be captured with an Infra-Bayesian model of a person/human.
Also on psychology: what is the boundary of personality, where just a “role” (spouse, worker, etc) turns into multiple-personality disorder?
oh good, my other project is psychology, so I really hope it circles back.
I originally got into the AI safety stuff because I was trying to understand psychological boundaries properly and realized that no one did. Then I realized that many people were maybe doing the same thing when thinking about interactions between AIs and humans.
Biology
Michael Levin’s work on cell cooperation
eg The Computational Boundary of a “Self”
eg Nested Selves: Self-Organization and Shared Markov Blankets in Prenatal Development in Humans
cell gap junctions
Related, consciousness frame: where is the boundary of it? Is our brain conscious, or the whole nervous system, or the whole human, or the whole human + the entire microbiome populating them, or human + robotic prosthetic limbs, or human + web search + chat AI + personal note taking app, or the whole human group (collective consciousness), etc.
Some computational theories of consciousness attempt to give a specific, mathematically formalised answer to this question.
Hmm I’m confused about why people ask “where is the boundary?” in this situation.
I visualize this situation as more of a topological map, kinda like
where the horizontal axes are kinda like physical space (more precisely: such that pieces (e.g.: your arm, your brain, web search, personal note taking app) thar are more closely connected are closer horizontally)
and the vertical axis is like “communication bandwidth”. For example, the communication bandwidth (ability to sense and control) between your brain/nervous system and your arm is pretty darn high, probably higher than almost anything else in the universe.
Yeah, you could try to cut out a particular hill in that topology and say “that hill is Bob” but that’s obviously cutting a lot of detail.
This is also maybe one of my qualms about anchoring this idea on the words “membranes” and “boundaries”… i think the actual structure is a bit more continuous. “Membranes” are a nice anchor abstraction for other reasons though so I’m sticking with it for now
Mathematics
Category theory because it will help you spot patterns in your membrane interfaces
Graph theory to learn about network effects and simplifications as multiple membranes interact
Type theory if you’ll be writing code
Set theory maybe?
Linear algebra to handle convolutions
Non-technical topics thread
geopolitics, sovereignty
(This all seems very Sante Fe. Anything from the Sante Fe Institute to link?)
In the most recent episode of his podcast show, Jim Rutt (former president of SFI) and his guest talk about membranes a lot, the word appears 30 times on a transcript page: https://www.jimruttshow.com/cody-moser/
thanks just listened to it. This reminds me a lot of what Scott Garrabrant has been thinking about. Perhaps intentionally setting up membranes within a society so that failure/infection/etc. in one region doesn’t infect every other region. They talk about the same thing but for insight in solving problems
Program design
separation of concerns
The intentional stance
Related: Discovering Agents
Computer security
Boundaries-based security and AI safety approaches
Mark Miller’s Object-capability model
Principle of least privilege