Ask A Genius 871: Persistence is Consistency and a Tangle of Information, Embedded
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/01/15
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: When we talk about persistence, we’re talking about interesting persistence instead of a rocky planet with no life. I mean, yeah, it can exist and will exist for maybe tens of billions of years, but not so interestingly. So, interesting persistence is life and things that can respond and survive via thought in a changing environment. So, it’s not just life; it’s life plus the artificial creatures. We’re just starting to create an interesting persistence that is somehow tangled up with information because things that are interestingly persistent develop an internal model of reality in a lot of organisms that we think about commonly. That model of reality is embedded in consciousness because being conscious turns out to be very helpful in being persistent, but you can have a model of reality and respond to changes in the environment without being conscious. Plants and amoeba respond, and they have mechanisms that let them respond to gradients and changes and conditions in the environment, whether they’re consciously aware of them or not. The whole deal of persistence is based on being able to juke around and find ways to survive based on… that information is all braided into.
Also, there is an increase in information over time. In regular physics, information is conserved, neither created nor destroyed. In IC, the universe builds itself out of increasing amounts of information, and it remains to be figured out what role individual creatures and civilizations that become more information-rich and become better and better at processing information, what role they have in the evolution or in the timeline of the universe. It makes sense that those things will come to exist over time, but do those things have a role to play in the persistence of the universe? Do the conscious beings and then the very powerful information processors within the universe help make the universe itself a more powerful information processor?
With regard to evolution, evolution has a versatile language that has allowed it to try a zillion things, which has eventually led to consciousness and to creatures who can direct their own trans-evolutionary processes like hyper-evolutionary because we creatures that understand processes and can direct processes instead of the mostly undirected processes of evolution.
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Outside of asexual reproduction and sexual reproduction, do you think there’s any other niche that evolution hasn’t found?
Rosner: Yeah, I think there’s a lot, though I haven’t thought about it a lot.
Jacobsen: Susan Blackmore calls technological evolution sort of a field of temes akin to memes, a third replicator.
Rosner: Well, technological evolution is like meta-evolution; evolution that’s aware of itself and is driven to create more powerful and complicated forms, though not entirely. Capitalism is a form of cultural evolution, and capitalism likes more complicated forms if it lets you exploit markets; capitalism doesn’t hesitate to create stupid shit either, but that’s the same as a natural evolution, that evolution over time will create increasingly complicated organisms to explore new niches. At the same time, it’ll go ahead and create new stupid organisms if there are niches that can be exploited by simpler organisms.
Jacobsen: We have an open question too. It matters for persistence; it matters for reproduction. We don’t know if true intelligence in a species is lethal, if it is a self-extinguishing trait of a species in the long term.
Rosner: You can make statistical inferences, and at the very least, you can say that high intelligence doesn’t always destroy the species.
Jacobsen: I Googled it. The most prominent species on the planet are beetles; they have some intelligence. I would argue they’re not that intelligent. So, for ubiquitous presence of a species, a little bit of intelligence might help.
Rosner: What you’re saying is there are more species of beetles on Earth than any other type of animal.
Jacobsen: Beetles make up about one-third of all known insect species.
Rosner: Yeah, so they’re a good versatile model.
Jacobsen: Microscopic worms are four-fifths of the life of animals on the planet.
Rosner: By mass or by number?
Jacobsen: That’s a good question. According to BYU professor Byron Adams, there are 57 billion nematodes for every human on Earth.
Rosner: Ah! So, by numbers, at least, and maybe by mass, leaves are a versatile structure. I don’t know how many different kinds of leaves there are, but the basic leaf recipe is adaptable and useful. So, the worm form is adaptable and persistent beetles are; it’s some basic recipe that there’s not one best leaf, but the leaf system is good enough that it’s become the predominant mechanism from which plants gather energy. Does that mean that it’s unlikely that there’s a better system that could be engineered for passively gathering and mostly passively gathering energy from sunlight? I think we can engineer better systems. I’m sure when you look at leaves, they can be outdone, if not now within 10 years, but we could engineer better structures for pulling energy from light or storing energy from light, gathering and storing, but leaves are pretty good because they’ve evolved over billions of years.
You could argue whether human technology is still a product of evolution because we evolved to be the creatures that can come up with the technology, but I think it’s a better argument to say that’s kind of bullshit-y and that human technological and cultural evolution does not fit under the umbrella of natural evolution. What was the original question, or you said there’s an open question?
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Jacobsen: The question is, is intelligence a lethal mutation? Basic intelligence like a nematode or beetle functions it works; that structure of mind and that structure of an organism, whether a hard shell or…
Rosner: All right, so what you’re really asking is are humans going to wipe themselves out from being too smart and too powerful at manipulating technology.
Jacobsen: Obviously, we notice a lot of stupid behaviour and thinking across the species. We make fun of it all the time on X and other platforms, on meta, on TikTok, and so on. I think that actually is an indicator of a generally high intelligence relative to other species because we’re able to note it and point it out.
Rosner: Anyway, I don’t think humans are going to wipe themselves out, and I think statistically, I would guess that intelligent species don’t wipe themselves out. There are a number of ways for an intelligent species to wipe itself out, but two of the bigger categories are… Well, there’s war, there’s exhausting a planet’s resources and making it uninhabitable, and then there’s committing suicide. It’s possible that an entire species could decide that life is absurd and that continued existence isn’t justified and just decide to blink themselves out. I think that would be really uncommon.
Jacobsen: I would call this Conscious Lemming Zero, and I want to coin it.
Rosner: Lemmings don’t do that; that was a mischaracterization.
Jacobsen: As well, in terms of the boiling water, the frogs jump out.
Rosner: A spinach doesn’t have a ton of iron.
Jacobsen: Right, it’s similar to Mother Teresa when you want to make an example of a good person. The truth, as Christopher Hitchens pointed out, is that she wasn’t a friend of the poor; she was a friend of poverty. She kept people in poverty because she thought it was God’s will. That’s not a good person. The popular image is that she’s a good person. Those are entirely different things. The historical record and her pop culture are similar.
Rosner: Before we got off on frogs and Mother Teresa, we were saying… I have to say I’ve been up since… because when you go from London to LA, the day becomes eight hours longer.
Jacobsen: I felt like that in Ukraine.
Rosner: So, I’m possibly slightly loopy. So, I lost the thread. What was the original?
Jacobsen: Is intelligence a lethal mutation?
Rosner: I mean just mathematically; I would guess that because I think, and I think you agree, that there’s no limit to the size of a possible universe. The set of all possible universes or moments within the universe can be any size short of infinity.
Jacobsen: I would only disagree as a matter of being a stickler. I agree with the general point. I would only disagree with this analogy: we don’t know what the highest number of pi is.
Rosner: No, Pi has no last digit.
Jacobsen: Oh, that’s true. So, it’s different types of infinities we’ll say. We don’t know how large the largest could be or how the laws of the world would have to work in order to get bigger and bigger universes.
Rosner: But we’re guessing that there’s no limit, and every moment that can possibly exist has a history that created it. The bigger the universe, the longer the history for the most part, and just the mathematics of it suggests that we think that consciousness is embodied in the information processing of any reasonable universe, and that means that there are conscious entities of any size and any length of history which suggests that intelligence or powerful conscious information processing is not 100% fatal. There’s literature around this kind of thing that’s annoying either way you go. There’s literature or science fiction that presents Earth as a very special place, a place that’s evolved art and love and music. That’s kind of the Star Trek view of a benevolent, optimistic, positive picture of humanity and that humanity is very special. Then there’s an opposite view that can be just as cliched, which is that every freaking aspect of human existence is likely to have been… well, not every aspect, but that everything you can think of reasonably; art, music, war, cruelty, fucking, has happened among conscious creatures just about every time higher consciousness evolves and that there there’s nothing special about humans.
[Recording End]
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