same in biology, evolution works very different with a competent substrate (cells that can already solve problems)!!
if the mapping between genotype and phenotype is not hardwired, but an intelligent interpretation process, then some very interesting thigns happen to evolutionary search, it becomes much faster, and many interesting things happen
having that middle layer / translation layer / morphogenesis greatly potentiates it
selection for adaptation / broad competency / robustness to different environments across different scales (is one of my takeaways)
the competency makes up for deleterious mutations
which means you get to try out good ones that come bundled with bad ones or like some bad ones that become good in combinations with others can stay dormant/harmless and then once the other pieces are in place come to shine
structure vs competency tradeoff ((un)reliable substrate vs algorithmic (in)competency)
having more of one makes it harder to select for the other
functional information: the idea of reposing the notion of information/complexity as “once things become composable, the amount of combinations that can exist explodes, which is much more functional in some sense”
composition space growing → functionality growing
blaize: what’s missing from kolmogorov information is the notion of compositionality / scale
life is an engine for turning random encounters into algorithmic information for how to make stuff / do stuff in the future
it composes hierarchically, which gives a multi-scale / compositional quality which isn’t captured by the kolmogorov sense of it; basic theory work ahead to get a better handle on the basic information theoretic properties of life
part of cognition is goal-directedness, part of it is creative play (not just in mamals but at every scale)
the richer an environment is with “active affordances”, things you can attach to that give you stuff for free, ..?
“epistemic affordance”, curiosity, play, quantified by relative information gain / KL divergence, …
only the case when / can only derive the epistemic affordance as the natural behavior of certain kinds of things, when you have a sparse deep hiearchical structure, when the inside of the internal model can no longer see the interface / actions that it interfaces with the world, then you can interpret the inside as a good regulator / generative model, which looks as if it’s planning into the future to maximize information gain, which can only happen if you have this deep sparse structure, nested markov blanket
a single celled organism with just one blanket has direct access to the world
with deep structure, you get this – the notion of play, information seeking, the connection to reasoning “I’ll do this because then I’ll know / it’ll look like X – as an emergent property
if you think about the brain as a collection of connections, it’s almost empty. Out of all the connections you could have, there are hardly any there!
perspectives allow you to overload different meaning onto the same [thing/computation]
that’s cheaper than messing with the material, which can screw up dependencies / things downstream
so that’s what biology seems to prefer to do
A dynamical system doesn’t have to optimize something in order to stay alive
“you’re gonna die because something else is going to eat your lunch” is not the case for a lot of organisms in a lot of situations
things create lunches for eachother, mutually reinforce eachother, lots of space for other things to happen
trying to define play as “only things that satisfy your curiosity / …” is kinda like trying to define art (very particular/value laden/antropomorphic term)
being free from constraints → more behavioral freedom, more rich / complex behaviors
e.g. some birds (after they got domesticated?) developed more rich / complex songs being in a less constrained environment
most things do not operate in a very constraint / fight for your survival environment (shaking your bum while skinning - a deer does not cost you that much more energy that you have to worry about it – humans especially are usually way up the maslows hierarchy (but this also points towards what we should do to unfold society’s full potential))
consistent with children playing more
consistent with the origin and etymology of “scholar” (“leisure”) / the history of philosophy