If someone asks what the rock is optimizing, I’ll say “the actions”—i.e. the rock “wants” to do whatever it is that the rock in fact does.
This argument does not seem to me like it captures the reason a rock is not an optimiser?
I would hand wave and say something like:
“If you place a human into a messy room, you’ll sometimes find that the room is cleaner afterwards. If you place a kid in front of a bowl of sweets, you’ll soon find the sweets gone. These and other examples are pretty surprising state transitions, that would be highly unlikely in the absence of those humans you added. And when we say that something is an optimiser, we mean that it is such that, when it interfaces with other systems, it tends to make a certain narrow slice of state space much more likely for those systems to end up in.”
The rock seems to me to have very few such effects. The probability of state transitions of my room is roughly the same with or with out a rock in a corner of it. And that’s why I don’t think of it as an optimiser.
Exactly! That’s an optimization-at-a-distance style intuition. The optimizer (e.g. human) optimizes things outside of itself, at some distance from itself.
A rock can arguably be interpreted as optimizing itself, but that’s not an interesting kind of “optimization”, and the rock doesn’t optimize anything outside itself. Throw it in a room, the room stays basically the same.
This argument does not seem to me like it captures the reason a rock is not an optimiser?
I would hand wave and say something like:
“If you place a human into a messy room, you’ll sometimes find that the room is cleaner afterwards. If you place a kid in front of a bowl of sweets, you’ll soon find the sweets gone. These and other examples are pretty surprising state transitions, that would be highly unlikely in the absence of those humans you added. And when we say that something is an optimiser, we mean that it is such that, when it interfaces with other systems, it tends to make a certain narrow slice of state space much more likely for those systems to end up in.”
The rock seems to me to have very few such effects. The probability of state transitions of my room is roughly the same with or with out a rock in a corner of it. And that’s why I don’t think of it as an optimiser.
Exactly! That’s an optimization-at-a-distance style intuition. The optimizer (e.g. human) optimizes things outside of itself, at some distance from itself.
A rock can arguably be interpreted as optimizing itself, but that’s not an interesting kind of “optimization”, and the rock doesn’t optimize anything outside itself. Throw it in a room, the room stays basically the same.