Select an article from the list.
Select an article from the list.
What is this?
I never liked writing, but it’s important, so I have to practice.
I gave myself some constraints:
- Each note has to fit in a screenshot from my phone
- No links allowed
- No equations allowed
- No help from AI
- No help from Googling
I have to say that writing like this is quite fun.
Buona Lettura
Life
The Earth is in the middle of two thermal reservoirs: The Sun and deep space.
If two thermal reservoirs are available it becomes possible to extract energy.
Once you have this energy you can use it in a multitude of ways
- Store it for later
- Create more copies of yourself
- Increase the amount of energy you can extract in the future
You can try to get more creative, but most of the other options are variations or combinations of the ones above
Any heat engine that does any of the above is a life form
Since the extractable energy is not infinite it is inevitable to enter a competition between the various life forms. That competition is evolution
The importance of Curiosity
Every emotion has a function
- Love is for reproduction
- Fear is for avoiding risks
- Curiosity is for learning
Like every other emotion, they exist because they are useful for survival, and as such they are just emergent behaviours
I believe engineering emergent behaviours in AI is a waste of time, but curiosity is special— Curiosity is what makes us curate our own dataset
The whole field of dataset curation will be irrelevant once a good model for curiosity arises
The free energy principle promises to model curiosity starting from bayesian mechanics, but I haven’t found a good explanations or convincing experiments
You don’t control your reward circuitry. That’s by design
If you had a button that can activate your reward circuitry you would spam it until you die
This actually happened in real life:
In the 80s doctors implanted an electrode in a patient’s brain capable of stimulating her
thalamus.
The woman could control it with a device and the results where devastating
Addictive drugs are like that button. That’s why they are bad
In general whatever controls your reward model, controls you. Choose what controls you wisely
It is supposed to be the most amazing world there can ever be.
We humans design virtual worlds, and they are called video games. They don’t look at all like the stereotypical type of world you associate with concept of paradise— That’s because jumping aimlessly in the clouds is boring
We humans want challenges, and a perfect world doesn’t have any.
Artificial super intelligence can turn our world into a paradise: pointless and boring
Lately I’ve been playing less video games because the real world is more fun.
…
Is our world actually a paradise in disguise?
Every Minecraft player subconsciously knows what is the meaning of life
In most games you are given a mission— that’s the meaning of your life inside of that video game
But Minecraft is different, you are given a world and its laws of physics: its game mechanics. Sounds familiar?
Every game of Minecraft has no “real” meaning. Despite this, Minecraft is the most played video game of all time, and it’s no coincidence.
Usually the developers take on the task of choosing the game’s mission. Notch *the creator of Minecraft* has delegated the role of choosing that to you.
If the meaning of life is given externally, it’s just restriction— But if it comes from within you, then it’s freedom.
In GTA you are a criminal and you earn money doing crimes— It’s very formative I must say.
But being a criminal is no easy task, it’s a lot of work— Fortunately in GTA there are cheat codes
When I first discovered that, It was amazing! I would fly around with helicopters and I wouldn’t even need to land them properly— If it crashes I can take a new one
But within in a few days, what was once a fun game, became pointless and boring. Why even play if I already have everything?
So I started a new campaign— I went back to being poor, and I fell in love with the game again.
In real life it’s the same: I much prefer my life over the life of a billionaire’s son.
That’s because I have an objective to strive for— It’s very formative I must say.
Every word in the vocabulary is defined in terms of other words. Isn’t this strange?
Some words indicate things in the real world, so that solves the paradox, but some words are peculiar…
Take the world “Existence”: It can only be defined in terms of itself (try it).
This subtle fact explains why some questions are wierdly un-answerable:
- Why do I exist?
- What is existence?
- Why does the universe exist?
All of these questions can be translated into:
Why does *this thing that exists* exist?
And since the definition of existence is recursive the question is recursive and the answer is recursive. People that don’t understand recursion get stuck in an infinite loop.
In any self-organising system with limited resources each sub-element competes to get them
- In human societies companies compete for resources
- In ecosystems life forms compete for resources
- In multicellular organism cells compete for resources
In multicellular organisms some cells are better than others at gaining resources and multiply
Sometimes the immune system kills them, but the best ones survive and develop over time resistance and speed
If they are too good they grow so much to ultimately kill the host and themselves in the process
Ironically, they are so good at playing the game that they end up loosing
Thankfully the process through which scientific theories get established is fundamentally un-democratic. Is it possible to do the same with policies?
With open source projects, if you are not happy with the governance, you can just fork it, however you can’t fork a nation.
This is because the most fundamental property of a nation is the monopoly on violence; if you split it into two, you don’t have it anymore.
We need to disentangle the monopoly on violence from policy.
One way is having one federal government that only takes care of the army, and hundreds of self-governing districts that take care of all the rest—laws included.
If a district turns to shit, either they fix their course, or everyone is going to leave. I must say that this model needs improvement, but it’s much better than just democracy.
If an alien came to the earth and read the New Testament and the Quran, he would come to the conclusion that the Muslim nations are nations of warriors, while the Christian nations would be helpless.
Turns out it's the other way around.
The reason is tolerance: Most behaviors that deviate from the norm are just stupid, but sometimes those strange ideas push the boundaries and lead to progress and prosperity.
On the other hand, an intolerant society leads to stagnation.
Guess which nation wins in a war?
Neural networks and transformers are universal approximators—most semi-popular architectures are.
Great, we’ve already got something that can approximate the human brain—We just need to train them in the right way.
Next token prediction is great, but it’s not the end of the story.
We need something similar to the human reward model.
Money is a good candidate—this is because we humans can use money to get thing that we want (aka. that reward us).
The problem is that the money earned is a sparse and noisy signal.
I just realized that this is the most important quality there is.
It’s the only thing that people I love and admire have in common.
Sometimes I wonder if the world rewards people with a golden heart. I think in the long term it does.
It’s going to be very hard, but I want a golden heart.