[Jerrrrrrrry]

No matter how far we go, we end up with generation / discrimination architecture.

Its is the core of any and all learning/exellency; exposure to chaotic perturbations allow selection of solutions that are then generalized to further, ever more straining problems; producing increasingly applicable solutions.

This is the core of evolution, and is actually derivable from just a single rule.

[gobdovan]

I don't think generation/discrimination is fundamental. A more general framing is evolutionary epistemology (Donald T. Campbell, 1974, essay found in "The Philosophy of Karl Popper"), which holds that knowledge emerges through variation and selective retention. As Karl Popper put it, "We choose the theory which best holds its own in competition with other theories; the one which, by natural selection, proves itself the fittest to survive."

On this view, learning in general operates via selection under uncertainty. This is less visible in individual cognition, where we tend to over-attribute agency, but it is explicit in science: hypotheses are proposed, subjected to tests, and selectively retained, precisely because the future cannot be deduced from the present.

In that sense, generation/discrimination is a particular implementation of this broader principle (a way of instantiating variation and selection) not the primitive itself.

[Jerrrrrrrry]

I agree, I meant to be explicit that the one rule was "gravity";

Variation (chaos) comes from the tidal push/pull of all cumulative processes - all processes are nearly periodic (2nd law) and get slower - guaranteeing oscillator harmonics at intervals.

These intervals are astronomically convulted, but still promise a Fourier distribution of frequency: tidal effects ensure synchronization eventually, as all periods resonate eventually.

As systems are increasingly exposed to pendulums of positive and negative coherence, they will generalize for variance, and eventually for increasingly (fourier) selective filters of increasingly resiliente traits, that will generalize.

The system would eventually be increasingly resilient and eventually an awareness would develop.

Awareness of past periodic cycles would improve fitness (with or without consciousness) and eventually the mechanistic processes would be in the systems nature.

This is why we have pointless traditions, folk lore, collective unconscious artifacts, cyclical cataclysmic religions, the Fermi Paradox, the great filters...

Variation and selection are woven, but understanding how it all stems from gravity by means of nearly perioidic oscillators (spinning planets, tidal pools, celestial bodies) due to the conservation of angular momentum, due to the 3body problem.....that is what took a genius to reconcile

[zoogeny]

> eventually an awareness would develop

I am not sure how this is a necessary conclusion to the premises you provide.

[Jerrrrrrrry]

Awareness would be any form of agency, goal seeking, or loss minimizing.

As Briggs–Rauscher reactions can eventually lead to Belousov–Zhabotinsky reactions, the system can maintain homeostasis with its environment (and continuing to oscillate) by varying reactants in a loss minimizing fashion.

This loss minimizing would be done during scarcity to limp towards an abundance phase.

This is the mechanism that hypothetical tidal pools batteries would had exhibited to continue between periods of sunlight/darkness/acidity that eventually gets stratified as a resilency trait.

[luma]

I'm not sure if you're familiar with the work from the lab of Mike Levin at Tufts but I'm betting you'll find it interesting if not. Here's a taste https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6923654/

While I disagree with your notion that this is explicity due to gravity, the rest of your argument seems to align with some of this lab's work. Learning can be demonstrated on scales as low as a few molecules, way below what we would normally call "life".

[zoogeny]

I'm not sure what your argument is here, except stating an opinion that loss minimization is equivalent to agency. But even if that was accepted, which is a huge stretch, it doesn't stretch all the way to awareness.

[Jerrrrrrrry]

It is, in context of its place in the cosmic scale.

Loss minimizing to a few problems will generalize into abstraction, and a few solutions will develop.

These systems with more generalizable resilency traits will encounter increasingly varied selective sieves.

Systems that survive this seive will exhibit increasingly sophisticated, generalizable solutions to prevent loss of needed dependent reactions/resources.

These solutions must exert influence to be effective; influencing the environment for its own benefit.

As systems influence their environment, delineation of "self" and "environment" becomes a fundamental barrier.

The system would prefer itself, or be outcompeted by a similar system that does.

This layer of semi-life like material would form between sunlight and the oscillating reaction, and eventually envelope it, minimizing surface tension by means of a spherical cell like structure.

Small stuff runs off of loss minimizing at a force level for its mechanistic affect; from covalent bonds to cellular ion transport, the path of lesser resistance is the fundamental forces.

As systems become more complex, the minimizing is less directly attributable to the fundamental forces and becomes more of a Byzantine dependency/feedback network.

This byzantine labyrinth of interactions is called biology.

The delineation of self, the ego.

At the highest levels, geopolitics. At the human level, mate suppression. Lowest level, energy conservation.

All loss minimizing

[whattheheckheck]

So where does gravity come from?

[Jerrrrrrrry]

A cool illusion, just another emergent property of our geometrical solution: higher dimensional aperiodic tilings of a 10^80 faceted complex polyhedra "walking" on another large aperioidic Penrose plane, that is getting smaller in a dimension we observe as "energy".

Basically a dice with a bajillion sides is getting rolled along an increasingly slim poker table, house winning eventually.

Time only goes one way, protons dont decay, energy is radiated unto the cosmic background hiss, until homogeneity is reached as CMB, and entrophy reaches 1.

I dont know where it comes from, but I know the shape it makes as it rolls by.

[ilaksh]

It's a feedback loop.

I've always felt that the most important part of engineering was feedback loops.

Maybe nature is the greatest engineer ever?

[0xbadcafebee]

The most important part of engineering is problem-solving, which feedback loops don't necessarily do. The reason we are here as engineers is: 2.5 billion years ago, the earth made cyanobacteria, which flourished, then flooded the earth with toxic oxygen, killing almost all life on the planet. The initial feedback loop didn't solve a problem, it destroyed a use case. That's not a solution to a problem that an engineer would choose, even if those organisms that came after were pretty happy about it...

[Pausanias]

This process worked so spectacularly well that it eventually created human consciousness and the very concept of engineering... but I would never design a system that way because it killed version 1.0.

[NitpickLawyer]

Give hydrogen a few billion years and it starts wondering where it came from, and how it'd make v 2.0 better :)

[Jerrrrrrrry]

Systems emerge in times of abundance, and are whittled in times of scarcity.

The great oxygenation was a time of near catyclismsic scarcity for most complex organisms, as resources scale to food/energy requirements imply the most complex organisms were the most dependent on the environment, and were most impacted by changes.

Inversely, oxygenation was our most crucial abundancy pre cursor, as it provides a large substrate chemically for life to exhibit