This post is in reference to a comment thread on the gitter.im/t2tile/hardware webpage.
This post will also be a work in progress. What I’m proposing within this post is a difficult assertion to make, and more importantly, to make clear. I expect as I get feedback, I will continue to edit this post until it seems that I’m getting my point across reliably.
It seemed that the forum’s discussion contained a thread of frustration with the lack of progress that A-Life simulations seem to be having. Simulations, as run, don’t seem to express the kind of spontaneous jumps to higher levels of complexity that one would’ve hoped to see. After decades of research in this area, the inability for such simulations to mimic what we see in Mother Nature has taken away any academic and research interest in further pursuit of these subjects. This is probably also the reason that there are so few people pursuing research in ISAAC’s: since they would have been the natural platforms to enable simulations to run in real time and on real hardware.
There is a sense that there is a puzzle piece missing. No one knows what that missing piece is so they wait for someone else to produce the answer. What I want to suggest is that people in the field already know what that missing piece is, and it’s called intelligent choice.
Unfortunately, the topic of intelligent choice has been twisted into an intelligence => design => designer argument which has been glommed onto by various religious groups who use this line of reasoning to justify their concepts of what God might be. This has turned the topic of intelligent choice into an academic, no-go, toxic wasteland. Anyone attempting to follow this line of thinking into their A-life research risks sinking into the tar pit of intelligent design => designer arguments; which would be a career-ending move.
But suppose there were a way to introduce intelligent choice into A-life simulations that would not only keep one from getting caught up in the intelligent design => designer tar pit, but also, at the same time, strike a fatal blow to those very arguments?
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It took about 2 billion years before the first eukaryote cells appeared; cells that are capable of forming multi-cellular lifeforms. Another billion years (roughly speaking) passed before the resultant composite lifeforms became rigid enough in their structure to leave a fossil record. Considering how long it took Mother Nature to make these simple evolutionary steps, it should not be surprising if our own numerical models might take “forever” as well.
But I think the problem goes deeper than this. If you look at the world of bacteria today, you will see the same forwards and backwards evolutionary progressions that you see in A-Life simulations. The process of evolution towards ever more complex lifeforms seems to correlate with the appearance of the first creatures that can move in a self-directed manner; to swim, rather than just float around with the sea currents like a jellyfish.
The better response to the lament about the progress of A-Life simulations would have been to note that, since simulations are not reproducing what we see in the natural world around us, then Mother Nature must be doing something that is not being captured in simulation. A suggestion for what that might be, as noted above, is the appearance of the ability to choose. Something a higher lifeform can do that an agent in a simulation can’t do, is to say to itself, “Screw this. I’m sick and tired of this game. I’m going to leave and go somewhere else.” Note, this choice can only be made for agents that have the ability/option to get up and move away.
This is where A-Life simulations will always stall out. They take place within a bounded arena, with no frontiers to go to and with agents having no ability to step outside the simulation. There is no reward within the simulation for an agent to make the kind of fundamental evolutionary step these simulations are trying to recreate in the first place.
Randomizing an agent’s behavior within a simulation only leads to the phenomenon of “drift to the mean.” Whatever spawns an agent’s evolutionary steps toward higher complexity can’t, therefore, be based on random choice alone. The attribute which needs to be added to A-Life simulations to finally allow for that spontaneous evolutionary jump to increasingly complex ordering is the option of intelligent choice.
Returning for a moment to contrast my approach to ISAAC design versus that of Dave Ackley is to note that the Atoms in my case carry their own programming with them, while the Atoms in the T2-Tile Project rely on an external set of pre-programmed routines, shared by all of the other atoms in common, and which are indexed by a lookup table that in turn points to a common program memory.
There is no way within the T2-Tile Project approach for a single Atom to spontaneously reprogram itself and go off in a new direction. The reason I’m taking this particular approach to ISAAC design, is that, by having each Atom contain all of its own programming, independent of all other atoms, would allow for individual mutations to occur. Subsequently, those mutations can be shared with other Atoms by a process akin to sexual reproduction.
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Now back to the topic at hand. The hint for me as to how to proceed with the quest of introducing intelligent choice into A-life simulations began with this simple paper, "What does Maxwell's demon want from life? When information becomes functional and physical.” Author: J. H. van Hateren.
Within the discipline of physics, Maxwell’s demon is the archetypal lifeform; that is, an intelligent free-willed agent that can not only observe the world around it, but also interact with it in a way that allows it to extract energy from its environment; energy which can then be used to do the useful work of sustaining that intelligent agent’s existence.
But can a Maxwell’s demon actually exist? The existence of such an agent, at first pass, seems to violate the second law of thermodynamics. There have been various attempts through history to explain the paradox of Maxwell’s Demon. Current thinking is that Landauer’s erasure principal seems to have finally offered a reasonable explanation. But as the paper above argues, Landauer’s principal is still not sufficient yet to resolve the Maxwell’s demon paradox.
It has become my opinion, after several decades of pondering this physics problem, that the source of the paradox for Maxwell’s demon begins with the fact that there is no derivation or explanation within the laws of physics to allow for the demon’s existence. And for this reason, the demon never gets folded into the physics of the experiment’s description to start with. And since it never shows up in the experiment’s construction, its existence always remains an outside element without resolution.
There is a way out of this paradox, and this is the humble proposal I want to put up for consideration.
The essential nature of Maxwell’s demon is one of intelligence and free will, but there is no place in physics for the concept of free will. No one can prove that free will is a property of intelligent life forms, nor can anyone prove that such is not the case. Faced with such a situation in mathematics, if a statement can neither be proven true nor false, then one is free to take it or reject it as an axiom and develop one’s mathematics from there.
The assertion I would like to make is that free will, as a property of intelligent agents, should simply be taken as an axiom within the laws of physics. Then we shall see what theoretically arises out of such an assertion.
Dear readers, please note, I have no intention or desire to become an apostle or apologist for some new way of thinking. All I want to do is propose a new idea as a subject of exploration.
So how does one embed the concept of free will into the laws of physics? First step is to strip the term free will of all its historical, philosophical, theological baggage and see what’s left at its core. That is, what needs to be added to the laws of physics that will allow for something like free will to arise from and be logically compatible with the already existing known laws of physics? Here is my humble proposal.
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What one needs to do is introduce a fifth law of thermodynamics, one which would state that something like “choice” exists, and which could then play the role of an anti-entropic force. This proposed fifth law would seem to be sufficient to allow for the breaking of strict determinism within the laws of physics. How this would work is the discussion that follows.
Start by taking a page from the field of mathematics: constructability is to mathematics what determinism is to physics. What broke the constraint of constructability in mathematics was the introduction of the Axiom of Choice. With the Axiom of Choice, you can now prove the existence of sets which are not constructible in any manner. Something that a mathematician will take for granted, but will seem foreign to a physicist, is the fact that the Axiom of Choice can’t tell you “how”; it only gives you “permission.”
It is been shown mathematically that the Axiom of Choice produces no contradictions with any of the preceding rules for set theory and math logic. It can be taken as true, after which one gets one logically consistent mathematics. Or it can be rejected, which then generates an alternate but still logically consistent mathematics.
In some ways, the Axiom of Choice is a lot like Euclid’s Parallel Postulate which can be taken as either true or false with no contradiction to any of the preceding geometric postulates. And then, how you take this Parallel Postulate, generates either Euclidian or Non-Euclidian geometries.
In a similar way of thinking, in order for intelligent choice to exist, determinism has to be broken within the laws of physics. So, what could be the equivalent in physics to the Axiom of Choice in mathematics?
What first needs to happen within the discipline of physics is we need some kind of rule that will allow us to replace the constraint “derivable-from” with the less restrictive constraint “compatible-with.” In some sense, this is what Stephen Wolfram has suggested in his book “A New Kind of Science.”
It would seem at first pass that the introduction of intelligent choice into the laws of thermodynamics would produce an immediate contradiction to the second law. But it turns out that such would not be the case. The second law is an outside observer’s black-box view of a thermodynamic system. It can only make global statements about a thermodynamic system. It makes no specific statements about what can, or cannot, go on internally within such a system.
By contrast, this proposed new fifth law makes only local statements about what can happen within a thermodynamic system. As long as its application does not change the outside view of the system, then the second law is not violated. A useful analogy might be Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which allows for the violation of energy conservation; but a violation which is allowed only locally in space-time.
If one assumes such a fifth law of thermodynamics, then one can simply introduce into an A-life simulation, without needing to justify its presence on any physical grounds, an intelligent choice function, and do so without fear of the specter of Maxwell’s demon showing up and calling into question your results. Remembering, like the Axiom of Choice, this fifth law doesn’t tell you how to create an intelligent agent within your simulation, it only gives you permission to do so.
Again, what this fifth law effectively does in practice is that it frees one from having first to demonstrate a strict derivability from existing laws of physics before one introduces a particular intelligent choice function into a A-Life simulation. All one needs to demonstrate is that the resultant outcomes are merely consistent with the laws of physics. Or to say it another way, this fifth law breaks the equivalence between “not-provable-from” and “in-contradiction-to” when discussing topics in physics in general.
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One could waste a lifetime debating the philosophical merits of such a proposal, so I won’t. But just say, for the sake of discussion, that this proposal is taken as a given. What happens then, if this extra faculty of choice, along with the addition of some kind of frontier region, outside of the simulation’s boundaries, that an agent can remove itself to, is folded in an A-Life’s simulation programming. Would it finally start to reflect the behavior of real evolutionary systems that you’re hoping to find?
