Context for LW audience: Ramana, Steve and John regularly talk about stuff in the general cluster of agency, abstraction, optimization, compression, purpose, representation, etc. We decided to write down some of our discussion and post it here. This is a snapshot of us figuring stuff out together.

Hooks from Ramana:

Where does normativity come from?
Two senses of "why" (from Dennett): How come? vs What for? (The latter is more sophisticated, and less resilient. Does it supervene on the former?)
An optimisation process is something that produces/selects things according to some criterion. The products of an optimisation process will have some properties related to the optimisation criterion, depending on how good the process is at finding optimal products.
- The products of an optimisation process may or may not themselves be optimisers (i.e. be a thing that runs an optimisation process itself), or may have goals themselves. But neither of [...]

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Outline:

(02:34) Intrinsic Purpose vs Purpose Grounded in Evolution

(17:13) Intrinsic Purpose from Minimum Description

(24:26) Objectivity vs Subjectivity

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First published:
July 15th, 2024

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pvBqB6F89enufZkYr/dialogue-on-what-it-means-for-something-to-have-a-function

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

“Dialogue on What It Means For Something to Have A Function/Purpose” by johnswentworth, Ramana Kumar, Steve Petersen

LessWrong (30+ Karma)

“Dialogue on What It Means For Something to Have A Function/Purpose” by johnswentworth, Ramana Kumar, Steve Petersen