A minimal model of experience and agents

Overview

 

Reality is made out of experience (there is information to be interpreted) and a first agent able to observe this experience. Experience and agents are likely the same thing (like some RNA type thing, which has the dual property of being software and hardware simultaneously).

In the first step, there is experience and there is an agent that gets to have an experience. This agent has a special move called observation. When an agent observes, it is essentially differentiating a slice of experience, which results in new objects. Objects are themselves agents (they get to experience) but are simultaneously something new to be experienced. This new agent (any agent) also has the special move observe and so is also capable of creating new objects/experiences.

 

 

Description

 

This is a minimal model that imagines a universe where the act of observation is the main mechanism behind generating novelty and new information. I must say and perhaps warn you that this borrows from a panpsychist view of reality in that it assumes that there is an original observer and an original experience (original as in singular and first of its kind). I am also using the word information loosely to describe phenomena that can be experienced and configured in distinct ways.

Reality is made of experience and observers. There is information to be interpreted and agents capable of processing this information via observation. An important piece of this imagination is that observers and experiences are actually the same thing, which I simply label as agents. This gives us a picture where agents are couplings that can both experience and be experienced. Indeed they are information that can be witness by observing but are also observers that can process novelty (by novelty I meant encountering of never before observed information). If you would like a mental map or analogy of what this might look like, remember the RNA molecule which has the dual property of being a machine (replicating itself via its 3D configuration) and software (carrying information as a string of molecular symbols). In this way, agents are machines with information processing capacity but also information in that they are something to be experienced.

Now lets describe the act of observing. Observing is the mechanism by which information gets processed and is probably what we mean by when we say we have "experiences". When an agent observes a phenomena it is slicing a particular piece of the whole informational content of what is being experienced and processing it into something new: it relates to the information processing capacity of an agent to transform it into something else. By taking that original piece of information and transforming it into a permutation of it, it is essentially generating a new agent that has never existed before. In short and to make it clear, this means that an observer can interpret a piece of information to generate a slight (or maybe not so slight) variation of it. This new variant has a fraction of the informational content of the observed experience.

With these ingredients I can now relay a story in which at generation 0 a single agent existed which necessarily interpreted itself thereby creating secondary agents in generation 1. Let's also say that this first agent at generation 0 carries 100% of the total information content of reality (which is basically itself), while at generation two, the information content is distributed among the created agents, as they all carry pieces of the base experience (generation 0 agent aka original agent). If we skip to a few generations downstream, then we quickly have a landscape of a ridiculous amount of unique agents. But remember; agents are both experiencers and something to be experienced by fellow agents. Each agent is also necessarily unique as the exact same kind of observation can never be repeated because each agents "creativity" is unique since they ar born of unique information.

We can also relate this picture of agents as akin to the memory of the universe. Indeed the collection of agents at generation n can be viewed as memory and traced back to a single lineage belonging to the original agent. This also means that there is no destruction of information and that all information exists as permutations of an original source.

Another important distinction is that not all agents have equal observation capacity. As agents get generated downstream of the original observation they have less dimensions of imagination. They have less creativity (lets say for now) compared to the founding agent (original agent) who has an unimaginable (haha) creative output. So this speaks to how the original agent can perform a massive amount of permutations on a piece of observed information (as well as access to the majority of the information of what is observed) while the lower or further away layers from source agent have a greatly reduced amount of imagination in terms of the agents that they can produce.

Generations can also be thought of as layers, where the original agent is the base layer, and subsequent agents get assorted into their own specific layers according to their imagination capacity.

It is my intuition that at a certain step of this story an agent had to have created the building blocks of matter and its properties that physicists study today. I can also tell you that we humans are probably quasi infinetly far from the original observer in terms of computation capacity and originality as observers and that we also create agents or information, this is what we recall as memory.

Observations are strictly n of 1 events. An agent can observe the whole experiential landscape or a tiny slice of it, each of its observations is unique. n = 1. What changes is that not all observers will be capable of capturing the majority of the informational richness of an experience. At each generation, observation gets nerfed and the experience that they are able to attend is only but a fraction of what it really is in base-line generation 0 experience. This means that at the beginning there is an obligate maximum information state. There is a lot more that can be said, bu I haven't done the thought experiments yet!

This is like a matryoshka, an onion, or a self embedded Torus of minds.