Synthetic Philosophy and Deductive Engineering
I would like to present a concise and reasonably complete account of the rationale for the key decisions I have made in shaping and progressing the SPaDE project.
The following rationale is constructed after the fact, it is not how I got here, but it is the way I think about where I am. This is not easy to do. What seems like a nice logical structure in my head invariably gets complicated when I have to explain ideas it depends on which have developed over a lifetime.
The rationale for SPaDE is intended to provide:
SPaDE and its rationale has been devised in the context of many years of varied experience in just some matters of relevance, resulting in a personal weltanschaumung parts of which may be essential to an understanding. Key points will be mentioned where appropriate, and links to more expansive explanations will be provided.
The whole is undertaken in the spirit of Peter Diamandis’ adage (law 19?) “the best way to predict the future is to create it”, with the qualification that understanding the future is pre-requisite to successful intervention.
My purpose in SPaDE is to exert positive influence on the future of the intelligent progeny of humanity, over the long term. I take “the long term” to be in the billions of years, like the history of life on earth.
Outcomes over such timescales are largely determined by evolutionary considerations. The notion of “positive influence” will itself evolve, rather than be fixed by present values. This renders the purpose, as stated, almost meaningless. One of the principle aims of the philosophical side of the project is therefore to improve that statement of purpose.
Because the purpose is expressed in terms of long term outcomes, both the description of how that purpose is to be realised, and the rationale for it depend upon a variety of background beliefs about how the future is likely to unfold, and how we might influence it. The most crucial elements of that background are enumerated here with links to more detailed accounts.
The chosen approach, under continuous review, is also dependent on my own interests and aptitudes. I give here some bullets on key elements, with links to more expansive discussions.
__________…
Knowing how to exert positive influence is therefore tricky, the chances of my exerting any significant positive influence are tiny.
Nevertheless, I have some ideas how it might be done, and these inform the SPaDE project and they have a rationale which is the subject of this document.
I take the progeny of humanity to be self-proliferating intelligent systems, and expect that their progression will be substantially determined by evolutionary considerations.
Such systems will be proliferating across the galaxy, and perhaps beyond, into environments which have little or no resemblance to the earths ecosystem. Even biological evolution is now on the verge of being transformed by synthetic biology, but cultural evolution the evolution of artificial superintelligence, and the proliferation of intelligence across the galaxy will radically change the nature of evolution.
Despite the difficulties, some speculations about the long term future seem reasonable. There are two main rationales for these projections. The first comes from the simple and natural structure of some of the abstract concepts in the foundations of logic and mathematics. The second comes from generalised evolutionary princi-ples.
The first enables us to anticipate with confidence features of declarative language and of declarative knowledge which enable the effective use of such languages and knowledge in the engineering of self-proliferating intelligent systems.
The fundamental principle of generalised evolution is simply that proliferation predominates, that those features of self-proliferating intelligent systems which most effectively promote proliferation will predominate in the short term and shape the long term future. This yields the evolutionary imperative: proliferate!