On good apples and bad apples...
me: When I’m looking at the stars with my eyes wide open with curiosity, I’m just doing what any life form with a big brain and learning capacity would do, seek novelty, form stories based on past experience and so on. Nothing special for a life form with a big brain. All the seemingly intricate questions like, what is the meaning of this all, why are there so many stars, or any question of such nature is just a convoluted way of the nature of how our brain works
myself: Dude, it’s midnight. Just sleep
me: Human behavior is complex, and biased
myself: You’re #jb3rkebr@b5%&*bjsdf
me: It seems pointless to ask these questions while I don’t understand how this thing inside my head works
myself: It’s all in your head
me: It is. What if we could find something simple, similar
myself: umm. You won’t find something, but you sure can create one
me: ooo. Abstraction based on past experience ie imagination. Me likey likey
myself: We’re not doing this right now are we?
me: We are
myself: AAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
To understand what we do and why we do, one way to approach the problem is to model our own behavior in a simple way. For that let’s start with a life form that doesn’t seem to be doing much. A tree.
So, what is it doing? What is it’s purpose? Is it to give us oxygen? To provide shade? To come into existence only to give us wood for our use? Without much stress, the answer is ‘no.
It is simply to spread itself. To reproduce, with self-preservation in view for the same.
Not very flexible right. Next we can ponder about the instinctual behavior of animals. That is not far from human behavior. There is just the added learning capacity which seems to convolute our own instinctual behavior. That makes us flexible and not some pre-programmed beings like bees or ants. Now basic to all life forms is self-preservation towards reproduction. Also there is flexibility due to learning capacity in certain life forms like human beings.
So, a robot with learning capacity in a thought experiment would do just fine.
To keep it simple, for the time, let’s take reproduction out of the scene. So it’s just self-preservation for our wall-e looking robot. For the flexibility part i.e. to instill a learning capacity, our wall-e 2.0 follows two specific rules. One is to continuously seek novelty. Other is to form memories from the experiences and be able to recall them. Wait. What? Seek novelty? Form memories from experiences? We haven’t described how it works, yet. And here is how it works. It scans. Scans an object for its geometrical shape and size, its texture, and its color imprint. Once the object is scanned, it assigns certain random figures to each of the attribute described that can be collectively or partially recalled as a memory of the object. The meaningless symbols come together to give meaning to the object in its memory. Simple enough? Yet another simplification required is the use of specific surroundings and environment. Pitch black planar piece of land with individual objects distributed throughout. The individual objects are just various types of fruits. Fruits? Why fruits? We’re talking about it’s self-preservation. So how does it preserve itself. Final weird piece to the picture is that it can somehow, ‘SOMEHOW’, convert fruits directly into the form of energy it requires. But all living things stop living at some point right. Here are the meta-metabolic rules for our wall-e 2.0. Each fruit it consumes, if consumable adds a energy bar on a scale of 5. And if it so happens that it consumes a bad/rotten fruit, it loses 1/2 a bar. Also an idol time of one human hour of not consuming anything results in loss of 1/4th of the energy bar. Loss of all energy bars will, umm, will result in its Asta Lavista. Keeping it simple:
Max. capacity = 5 = In the pink
Min. = 0 = So dead
1 Good fruit = +1
1 bad fruit = -0.5
1 hour of ideal time = -0.25
Remember that it is pre-programmed only for:
1. Consuming things for energy
2. Seeking novelty
3. Forming memories
Keeping it in the environment and surroundings described previously and turning it ‘on’, what do you think will happen? Try simulating if the only fruits are apples, both good and bad.