Talk:Holarchy
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Contents
Declarative and imperative
Declarative programming is a programming paradigm that expresses the logic of computation without describing its control flow. They describe what the program must accomplish in terms of the problem domain, rather than describing how to accomplish it as a sequence of programming language primitives. The how being left up to the language's interpreter - the agency that interprets the statements and performs actions based on them.
A declarative approach is inherently more natural, intuitive, and organised because it focuses on specifying objectives rather than the detailed steps to needed to achieve them, mirroring how we ourselves think and communicate. We intuitively perceive things in terms of problems and solutions the we use, assess, categorise and share. By abstracting away the underlying complexities, declarative programming presents solutions in a conceptually clear and understandable way.
Another important reason the declarative approach is so natural is because it enforces a clear separation of concerns whereby the rules, regardless of their language, represent a definite concept purely in terms of the local environment. The methodology of how to interpret the language and conditions into activity is entirely encapsulated within the language interpreter (agency).
We can see this general declarative organisational pattern showing up in many diverse forms such as business rules engines, the Global Workspace Theory of mind, the Blackboard Metaphor for parallel processes and even the dynamics of proteins within biological cells. It's fundamental to the way we think, learn and reason and we see it reoccurring across all scales of experience and reality.
A class definition includes a structured rule-set, it is a "package" of production rules along with related knowledge and resources. When instantiated and active, the rules occupy the local instance scope together. The rules are declarative in nature as they're all defined in terms of the local scope.
- declarative is the conditional side, imperative is the action side
Substrate independence
Substrate independence is a popular topic at the moment (2023). It's talked about in the context of possibly "uploading" a human mind into an technological information system of some kind in the near future. But if we think about this concept independently of the specifics of the cognitive architecture in question, then it really just means that we have an explicit model of the cognitive architecture that can be implemented universally. It means that the cognitive architecture is itself the root base-class of the system. It can implement itself in any other foreign context (substrate) that is accessible to the network.
Natural hierarchy
The ecosystem of life is organised as a holarchy. The hierarchical structure is seen in the distinct scales and regions of organisation such as cells and bodies. When we look at nature in terms of holarchy, we see that this same pattern of evolutionary organisations and societies continues up to the scale of Human societies and beyond. These are often referred as memes, that can be clearly physically delineated such as with nations and organisations, but can also be completely abstract such as an ideology or an ability.
Resource abstraction and AI
Developing this implementation requires two main things. First, informational resources such as servers, storage, transport and data sources need to be represented in the holarchy via resource abstraction and connection. And second, AI agency (AI within a cognitive architecture) to have threads of its focus within the subjective local context of each instance within a holon structure.
Philosophy
- archetypes, memes and the collective unconscious
- the current dominant patterns as archetypes
- the ship of theseus
- scale-independence and non-locality
Aligned with idealist models
Dreams and imagination show us that an idealist view is entirely plausible. Events of any arbitrary complexity (drawing from the dreamer's own knowledge about the world) play out experientially in space and time.
- the fact that experience has no direct connection to the material world makes it likely
- most modern idealist models are agent-oriented
- evolution is a minimal extension of agent basis
- evolution operates within the experiential space
Morality
- Hume: you can't derive an ought from an is (moral theories cannot be derived from factual knowledge). DD: Although factual evidence and moral maxims are logically independent, factual and moral explanations are not. Thus factual knowledge can be useful in criticising moral explanations.
- right and wrong are attributes of objectives and behaviours
- our behaviour is not in relation to the world, but rather to an abstraction of it
Variation
Variation is recursive in nature because it must treat itself as an object. In other words it must instantiate a version of itself within itself. This does not create any logical dilemma because it's the possibility that's infinite due to the recursion, not the instantiated actuality.
But the possibility of any instance is already infinite, since all objects are derived from root, so all instantiation is essentially the same thing as self-instantiation.
