rationalskepticism.org

archibald wrote:

John Platko wrote:I would suggest that if we want our IP to last it should have the same quality that a gene needs to last, it should be useful for survival in those it is passed on to (or if you want to be more technically fussy, useful for it's own survival). So IP that tends towards being helpful for life to grow will have more legs. And IP that incorporates better explanations of reality, i.e. is a better approximation of the truth, will out last poorer approximations of the truth. IP that has those qualities will have a higher probability to thrive and spawn new IP than IP that provides explanations that are poorer. e.g. not many people are generating new IP using Aristotle's metaphysics compared to the people using modern physics. And I don't think the IP of the those using metaphysics today is going to have legs.

Yes, I think this is better than anything I suggested. You are using the analogy with genes and evolution, which seems as useful here as it would if we are talking about memes (which in many ways your 'snippets of IP' do seem to resemble).

Let me add a thought, possibly one that you will like, given the other thread you linked me to. Is a catchy tune useful for survival? If so, survival of what? Itself only? I try to use this example because a catchy tune doesn't seem to need to be true or false, or an explanation.

I would say a tune IP is subject to a fitness function which determines the probability of its survival. If we dive down deep into a tune - which we can do in my other thread, we can start to see what qualities come into play. Some of them seem to be very mathematical - the relationships between notes that are in harmony and notes that are not. The fitness function is determined by a complex set of personal, cultural, and physical variables. Some of which change with time (modern music has more dissonance than earlier music), some of which seem more fundamentally rooted in our physical reality. For example, the way a string vibrates, or air moves in a pipe, seems to have a large effect on musical note IP.

I like musical examples because they are not trivial, they are interesting, they lend themselves more to computer modeling and experiment than some other forms of IP.

John Platko wrote:But I don't want to give the impression that IP is just about conscious information. IP is about more than that. There's our unconscious IP too.

Indeed.

Though I do think that if we want to talk about souls (or the equivalent by a different name) the bigger issue is the durability of people's IPs. To my way of thinking, these do not even remain intact while we're alive. In a trivial way, my IP is not what it was yesterday. In a less trivial way, a person's personality may change dramatically over the years, they may become mean-spirited and cynical if life does not pan out for them. And in a very fundamental way, if they get severe old age dementia it is not really them any more.

The way I think about that is to imagine a person like a sparkler (the firework sort of thing). The sparkler is lit by some other fire and then it continues on its dynamic process of burning and sending off sparks. It's in a continual state of change, it's certainly not the same sparkler it was before it was lit. As the sparks fly off, most burn out and their effect does little more than contribute to pollution, but another spark might land on a piece of dry wood and burn down the house. Perhaps the sparkler gets captured by the imagination of a child watching it and that inspires her to study chemistry. When the sparkler burns out, is it gone?

My interest in this subject is essentially an optimization/minimization problem. How to optimize the sparklers tendency to inspire the study of chemistry and how to minimize the sparklers tendency to burn down the house. And while there is a ripple effect of the sparkler in time, my ability to study the dynamics is best concentrated on shorter term effects, how to keep the sparkler from burning the child's hand. Not so much the very long term ripple effects caused by the house burning down.