Blaise Agüera y Arcas: evaluation

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…1 thing I wanna touch on is is the importance of the merge operator. We were talking about that earlier. Even Chomsky spoke about this. And you could argue whether the merge operator in language evolution was the Prometheus moment, whether it was phylogenetic or ontogenic. Because you were just talking about this, you know, this symbiosis and merging in a physical substrate, but it also happens in the information substrate. You get you get this kind of like memetic computer programs that ensconced themselves and maybe language was that, you know, I don't I don't know. But I I have a theory why merge is so important as opposed to to random selection. So I think creativity is is about grounding. It it's about path dependence, basically. So even the retroviruses and and all of these things, they they actually they form a lineage. And I think that if you don't use merge, you lose the lineage. And also something about the recursive merge operation allows you to build more complex computer programs, but allowing for this kind of reuse and canalization. There's something very natural about that. Yeah. I I completely buy everything that you're saying. I think that's exactly right. Except that I dislike Chomsky. So I think he's wrong he's wrong about language. I'm I'm much more of a fan of Dan Everett. I don't know if you're familiar with his work with the Piraha. Oh, it's it's wonderful. So he he spent a long time with the Piraha in in Brazil who are a a people whose language does not obey Chomsky's, you know, requirements for language. They don't have they don't have recursion. They don't have anything like center embedding, they also don't have numbers, and they don't have past and future tenses. You know, Everett wrote a wrote a great book some years ago called Don't Sleep There Are Snakes, which talks both about his experiences among the among the Piraha and language and also his big fight with Chomsky over this. Chomsky's papers are filled with theory and pseudo math and and have no time to give to ethnography or to actually studying any real languages. But anyway, I'm digressing. You know, putting Chomsky aside though, what what you're saying about merge or as I would see it composition, functional composition, I think is absolutely fundamental. It's it's how all technology is built. W Brian Arthur has written about this and how technology evolves. You know, that every every technological invention you know, it's funny, like, it every technology gets invented a dozen times around the same time as if everybody's in telepathic communication. And the reason is that every technology has precursors. You know, you can't get a light bulb until you know how to blow glass, how to make a vacuum, how to draw a filament, how to generate electric current. And when all those things were there and, you know, the need for light was there, the light bulb was gonna get invented. But it was invented, you know, a dozen times by different inventors with different contingent choices. You know, they might be, you know, which kind of filament do you use or is it prongs or do you screw in the light bulb? Which way do you screw it in? You know, what's the diameter? And and and those decisions as they get locked in determine the course of of everything after that that incorporates light bulbs. Yeah. So, you know, in a way, this this contingency, these these choices about exactly which way those combinations go is actually what the entire genome or whatever it is is made out of. In the case of BFF, the original replicators are really just single instructions that sometimes randomly, weekly, might copy themselves. 1 byte that moves here and there. But as those bytes get copied around, sometimes a couple of them end up together and then they'll they'll they'll copy as a group. They'll do better together. And and so the contingent thing, you know, which way they ended up getting copied, was it AB or BA, you know, that they stuck together, that's that's the information that the bigger thing is made out of, that little extra bit. thing, you know, which way they ended up getting copied, was it AB or BA, you know, that they stuck together, that's that's the information that the bigger thing is made out of, that little extra bit. Because, you know, in this case, you just had single bites, there was nothing, there was no information there to begin with. So so the merger tree, you know, ends up being exactly the information that is encoded in the final genome. It's all about the history.…

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