I have thought about this. I still don’t know if that obviates the concern about an advanced super-intelligence. Why would it not collaborate with the 4D spider wasps?
Kiboneu
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37C3 Hacker x Rationalist Meetup
Hi! Thank you for this walk in the space of insects. The spacial complexity implicit in pockets of miniature space seem akin to fractal dimensions or hausdorff dimensions.
Exploring insect space reminds me of my experience exploring non-self-similar 3D fractals, such as hybrid variants of mandleboxes and menger sponges. In these 3D fractals there are fields of complexity and patterns bound to specific scales, and zooming into surfaces would reveal more highly complex space on that surface; branches would “pop up”, and I could rotate my camera around these branches, then zoom into those. And I could repeat this until my zoom level exceeded the floating-point precision offered by by program I was using.
I also see what you mean by the implicit time / energy constraints when moving on surfaces giving extra dimensionality, from the perspective of an insect. Depending on the insect’s locomotion abilities certain surfaces would allow it to move way faster and easier than others, and the differences can be quite stark.
This reminds me of another insight, while thinking about brain-machine interfaces, regarding to how brain neurons are organized: neurons on the cortex / surface of the brain of are highly connected and have a high fractal dimension (~ 2.8 according to wikipedia and the paper it references). As you go deeper into the brain, towards the corpus callosum, this complexity is reduced… axons are longer and tend to be covered with myelin sheath, which increases the conductivity of these connections for longer-running connections. So from the perspective of a neuron in the cortex, neurons way further away can appear closer since the charge and sensitivity requirements between topologically distant neurons are similar to the connections of its neighbors.
As for Worm, I have not read it yet, but the ecological feedback loops being described here is very fun to think about.
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refs:3D fractal rendering software: https://mandelbulber.org/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fractals_by_Hausdorff_dimension
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S105381190300380X?via%3Dihub
This reminds me of an insight I found while staring at the ground, a spider was frantically crawling on the soil, under leaves and sticks and then suddenly through an opening a spider wasp sweeps in, attaches itself to it and kills the spider within a second.
Crawling insects are 2D navigation specialists, often prey to flying insects, 3D navigation specialists. In this sense a geometric dimension is used by the 3D specialists to hunt down crawling insects. Merely raising a dimension doesn’t give you the trap, though, because a high perception and energy cost is incurred to maintain that 3D navigation ability. With this perception and energy cost, flies are more vulnerable to the traps of spiders. These costs could probably be modeled as extra latent space dimensions alongside the spacial dimensions involved.
Web-weaving Spiders are 2D specialists that slice a 3D space with a sticky web, capturing 3D specialists without expending energy to navigate their prey’s space.
Just like it takes work for the manufacturer of moth traps to source the cardboard and obtain the knowledge of moth pheromones, it takes work for a spider to actually make the web (with patterns related to the silk’s transparency and web design encoded in DNA). That being said, I don’t know of spiders that coat their webs with prey insect pheromones to further attract their prey (and one is left wondering, would that be too small of a button as-to significantly deplete a spider’s food source?).
There are predator insects that mimic the flashing patterns of certain firefly species, but they have to have more “skin in the game” and can only trap-then-eat one firefly at a time, there is less of an asymmetry in this instance.
Effective traps are time <-> space translation constructions. The button of the construction is in latent space.
In the US, displayed prices are often not the actual price. Taxes and sometimes other fees like mandatory tips and bag fees are added to the total, which isn’t reflected until the very end. If people are used to this, then I can imagine that there is a level of constant uncertainty of a hidden variable that would lead to trusting the written suggestion. Just my 2 cents (plus tax).