Thank you for writing this up! It does, indeed, incite a bit of babble from my brain.
It seems to me like you are pointing at a cluster of several related concepts, though perhaps that’s because their underlying pattern of similarity is one of those things that seems obvious upon examination despite being non-obvious if one neglects to seek it out. Or perhaps I’m missing an interim level of commonality.
Drawings and paintings
If you spend much time in art software, you’ll notice that some digital brushes act like pens or pencils, others act like paintbrushes, and yet others act like stamps. The difference is not in the color that each tool applies to the virtual canvas, but rather in the interface between where the color was applied and where it wasn’t. I can reach the same arrangement of pixels with either tool (this is easiest to prove using an extremely small canvas and extremely limited color palette), but some arrangements are easier to reach with one tool, and some are easier to reach with another.
We tend to assume that a piece of art was created with the tool that’s easiest to reach it with, but sometimes part of the artistic performance is intentionally choosing a more difficult tool to get to a similar result. Consider those who pour weeks into photorealistic drawing and painting instead of spending mere minutes or hours to get an indistinguishably similar result with a camera.
And yet you can tell that the rock you stumbled into isn’t in fact internally optimizing for a utility function.
Does the set of utility functions have no identity element? The rock’s purpose is to be a rock, and it’s probably doing that quite well… If the thing you stumbled into is actually a log or a clod of dirt, it would be objectively bad at being a rock, and you might notice the difference when you notice that the log can float or burn, and the dirt can crumble easily. “Wow, that thing I thought was a rock is behaving in such an un-rock-like manner that I’d better re-evaluate it!”. Sure, a rock of volcanic pumice might float and feel very light for its volume, but I could consistently call it “not very good at being a rock” if I tried to use it for any purpose that requires a rock to be dense and heavy. The idea of what it means for something to be a rock comes from the observer, not the rock itself, and so the idea of the rock exists in a system that tends to like attributing some level of agency to everything it simulates.
What a rock does is follow the laws of physics, and that’s ultimately what everything else does too, although the rock has fewer moving parts, and we rarely look at rocks in a way that inspires us to model them as making choices. (counterexample: “my granite countertop decided to crack last week; it must not have liked the way the supports were installed under it”)
The method you use to create a product leaves its mark on it.
I read this as “we can very easily confuse different products for being the same thing”.
This is most obvious in your programming example: If the same prime-finding algorithm was implemented in Python and C, and you didn’t tell the observer how long each program had taken to run, they would not be able to tell the two lists apart, because it’d be the same list. If the output from the same algorithm differed, the difference would be proof that you had erred in implementing it, and thus the algorithm wasn’t the same at all. It’s only when you start changing the algorithm to suit the strengths of each language that you might get different outputs.
Thank you for writing this up! It does, indeed, incite a bit of babble from my brain.
It seems to me like you are pointing at a cluster of several related concepts, though perhaps that’s because their underlying pattern of similarity is one of those things that seems obvious upon examination despite being non-obvious if one neglects to seek it out. Or perhaps I’m missing an interim level of commonality.
If you spend much time in art software, you’ll notice that some digital brushes act like pens or pencils, others act like paintbrushes, and yet others act like stamps. The difference is not in the color that each tool applies to the virtual canvas, but rather in the interface between where the color was applied and where it wasn’t. I can reach the same arrangement of pixels with either tool (this is easiest to prove using an extremely small canvas and extremely limited color palette), but some arrangements are easier to reach with one tool, and some are easier to reach with another.
We tend to assume that a piece of art was created with the tool that’s easiest to reach it with, but sometimes part of the artistic performance is intentionally choosing a more difficult tool to get to a similar result. Consider those who pour weeks into photorealistic drawing and painting instead of spending mere minutes or hours to get an indistinguishably similar result with a camera.
Does the set of utility functions have no identity element? The rock’s purpose is to be a rock, and it’s probably doing that quite well… If the thing you stumbled into is actually a log or a clod of dirt, it would be objectively bad at being a rock, and you might notice the difference when you notice that the log can float or burn, and the dirt can crumble easily. “Wow, that thing I thought was a rock is behaving in such an un-rock-like manner that I’d better re-evaluate it!”. Sure, a rock of volcanic pumice might float and feel very light for its volume, but I could consistently call it “not very good at being a rock” if I tried to use it for any purpose that requires a rock to be dense and heavy. The idea of what it means for something to be a rock comes from the observer, not the rock itself, and so the idea of the rock exists in a system that tends to like attributing some level of agency to everything it simulates.
What a rock does is follow the laws of physics, and that’s ultimately what everything else does too, although the rock has fewer moving parts, and we rarely look at rocks in a way that inspires us to model them as making choices. (counterexample: “my granite countertop decided to crack last week; it must not have liked the way the supports were installed under it”)
I read this as “we can very easily confuse different products for being the same thing”.
This is most obvious in your programming example: If the same prime-finding algorithm was implemented in Python and C, and you didn’t tell the observer how long each program had taken to run, they would not be able to tell the two lists apart, because it’d be the same list. If the output from the same algorithm differed, the difference would be proof that you had erred in implementing it, and thus the algorithm wasn’t the same at all. It’s only when you start changing the algorithm to suit the strengths of each language that you might get different outputs.