My current best guess is that spacetime locality of physics is the big factor—i.e. we’d get a lot of similar high-level abstractions (including e.g. minds/reasoning/sensing) in other universes with very different physics but similar embedding of causal structure into 4 dimensional spacetime.
I’d expect symmetries/conservation laws to be relevant. cellular automata without conservation laws seem like they’d require different abstractions. when irreversible operations are available you can’t expect things entering your patch of spacetime to particularly reliably tell you about what happened in others, the causal graph can have breaks due to a glider disappearing entirely. maybe that’s fine for the abstractions needed but it doesn’t seem obvious from what I know so far
So in theory we could train models violating natural abstractions by only giving them access to high-dimensional simulated environments? This seems testable even.
My current best guess is that spacetime locality of physics is the big factor—i.e. we’d get a lot of similar high-level abstractions (including e.g. minds/reasoning/sensing) in other universes with very different physics but similar embedding of causal structure into 4 dimensional spacetime.
I’d expect symmetries/conservation laws to be relevant. cellular automata without conservation laws seem like they’d require different abstractions. when irreversible operations are available you can’t expect things entering your patch of spacetime to particularly reliably tell you about what happened in others, the causal graph can have breaks due to a glider disappearing entirely. maybe that’s fine for the abstractions needed but it doesn’t seem obvious from what I know so far
So in theory we could train models violating natural abstractions by only giving them access to high-dimensional simulated environments? This seems testable even.