Really? How do you know that?
You said: "Our civilisation maximises entropy." Our civilization consists of all the humans in the world. When you're asking what our civilization is trying to maximize you're asking what the humans of the world are trying to maximize. Humans try to do things they enjoy, things that are fun. Therefore our civilization tries to maximize fun.
I know that because that's basic human psychology 101. Humans want to be happy and have fulfilled preferences.
Are plants trying to maximise "fun"?
We're talking about our civilization. In other words, all the humans in the world. Plants aren't human, so whether they maximize fun is irrelevant. I suppose if you regarded human tools and artifacts as part of our civilization then agricultural plants could be regarded as part of it. But they aren't the part of our civilization that makes decisions on what to maximize, humans are.
Plants aren't trying to maximize anything. They're plants, they don't have minds. If I was to use the word maximize as liberally as you do I could actually argue that agricultural plants do try to maximize fun, because humans grow them for the purpose of eating, and eating is fun. But that wouldn't be strictly accurate, plants just execute their genetically coded behaviors, any purpose they have is really the purpose of the consequentalist minds that grow them, not of the plants. Saying that agricultural plants have any purpose at all is the mind-projection fallacy.
If "fun" is being maximised, why is there so much suffering in the world?
Because some humans are selfish and try to maximize their own fun at the expense of the fun of others. And sometimes we make big mistakes when trying to make the world more fun. But still, most of the time we try to work together to have fun. We aren't that good at it yet, but we're trying and keep improving. The world is getting progressively more fun.
If you systems are in contention, is it really the one that is having the most fun that will win?
Yes. Humans who are enjoying life the most are generally regarded as being more successful at life than humans who are not. This is a basic and easily observable fact.
The "fun-as-maximand" theory seems trivially refuted by the facts.
It's easily confirmed by the facts. As humans have grown richer and more technologically advanced they have devoted more and more of their resources to having fun. Look at the existence of places like Disneyworld for evidence.
"Fun" - if we are trying to treat the concept seriously - is better characterised as the proxy that brains use for the inclusive fitness of their associated organism.
No it isn't. Brains don't care about inclusive genetic fitness. At all. They never have. If you want evidence for that, note the fact that humans do things like use condoms. Also note that the growth of the world's population is slowing and will probably stop by the end of the 21st century if trends continue.
There's a scientific literature on the subject of what God's utility function is. Entire books have been written about the topic. I'm familiar with this literature, are you?
That literature has exactly zero relevance to our current discussion, which is what human beings, value, care about, and try to maximize. You learn about that by studying basic psychology. Evolutionary theory may give us insights into how humans came to have our current values, but it has no relevance on what we should do now that we have them.
Our values are what we value, how we came to have them is irrelevant. If our values were bestowed on us by an alien geneticist rather than evolution we would behave exactly the same as we do now. Humans don't give a crap about "god's utility function." If they end up increasing entropy it is as a side effect to obtaining their real goals.
We had better talk about "optimization" then, or we will talk past each other.
Optimization has the same problem. Optimization literally refers to a consequentialist creature using its future forecasting abilities to determine how an object or meme would better suit its goals and altering that thing accordingly. Evolution can be metaphorically said to optimize, but that isn't strictly true. It's just a form of personification to make thinking about evolution easier.
Strictly speaking, evolution is just a description of a series of trends. Since human minds are bad at modeling trends, but good at modeling other consequentialists, sometimes it's useful to pretend that evolution is a consequentialist with "goals" and a "utility function" to help people understand it. It's less scientifically accurate than modeling evolution as a series of trends, but it makes up for it by being easier for a human brain to compute. The problem is that, while most scientists understand this, there are some people who who misinterpret this to mean that evolution literally has goals, desires, and utility functions. You appear to be one of these people.
Really? How do you know that?
Because literally speaking, only consequentialist minds maximize things. You might be able to say evolution maximizes things as a useful metaphor, but literally speaking it isn't true.
Evolution is a gigantic optimization process with a maximand.
No it isn't. It is useful to pretend that it is because doing so makes it a little easier for the human mind to think about evolution. But really, evolution is just an abstract series of mindless trends.
You claimed above that it is "fun" - and my claim is that it is entropy.
I never claimed evolution tries to maximize fun. I claimed our civilization does. In other words, that the consequentialist minds making up human civilization use their forecasting abilities to foresee possible futures, and then steer the universe towards the one where they are having the most fun.
As I say, there's a substantial scientific literature on the topic - have you looked at it?
I'm familiar with some of the literature, and I've looked at your website. You constantly confuse the metaphorical "goals" evolution has with the real goals that consequentialist minds such as human beings have. For instance you say:
Another example: currently, researchers at ITER in France are working on an enormous fusion reactor, to allow us to accelerate the conversion of order into entropy still further.
This is trivially false, the reason researchers are working on a fusion reactor is to secure human beings cheap renewable energy to have more fun with. The fact that it increases entropy is a side-effect. The consequentialist human minds do not foresee a future with more entropy and take action in order to secure that future. They foresee a future where humans are using cheap energy to have more fun and take actions to secure that future. The entropy increase is an unfortunate, but acceptable side effect.
What you remind me of is one of those theologians who describe God as an "unmoved mover" or something like that and suggest such a thing must exist (which was a reasonable hypothesis at one point in history, even if it isn't now). They then make the ridiculous leap of logic that because an unmoved mover must exist, and you can call such a thing "God," that therefore a God with all the ludicrously specific human-like properties described in the Bible must exist.
Similarly, you take some basic facts about evolution and physics that every educated person agrees are true. Then you make bizarre leaps of logic to conclude that human beings care about maximizing IGF and maximizing entropy and other obvious falsehoods. I am not objecting to the evolutionary biology research you cite, I am objecting to the bizarre and unjustified inferences about human psychology and moral philosophy you use that research to make.
We had better talk about "optimization" then, or we will talk past each other.
Optimization has the same problem. Optimization literally refers to a consequentialist creature using its future forecasting abilities to determine how an object or meme would better suit its goals and altering that thing accordingly.
If I were to make a short list of the most important human qualities—
—and yes, this is a fool's errand, because human nature is immensely complicated, and we don't even notice all the tiny tweaks that fine-tune our moral categories, and who knows how our attractors would change shape if we eliminated a single human emotion—
—but even so, if I had to point to just a few things and say, "If you lose just one of these things, you lose most of the expected value of the Future; but conversely if an alien species independently evolved just these few things, we might even want to be friends"—
—then the top three items on the list would be sympathy, boredom and consciousness.
Boredom is a subtle-splendored thing. You wouldn't want to get bored with breathing, for example—even though it's the same motions over and over and over and over again for minutes and hours and years and decades.
Now I know some of you out there are thinking, "Actually, I'm quite bored with breathing and I wish I didn't have to," but then you wouldn't want to get bored with switching transistors.
According to the human value of boredom, some things are allowed to be highly repetitive without being boring—like obeying the same laws of physics every day.
Conversely, other repetitions are supposed to be boring, like playing the same level of Super Mario Brothers over and over and over again until the end of time. And let us note that if the pixels in the game level have a slightly different color each time, that is not sufficient to prevent it from being "the same damn thing, over and over and over again".
Once you take a closer look, it turns out that boredom is quite interesting.
One of the key elements of boredom was suggested in "Complex Novelty": If your activity isn't teaching you insights you didn't already know, then it is non-novel, therefore old, therefore boring.
But this doesn't quite cover the distinction. Is breathing teaching you anything? Probably not at this moment, but you wouldn't want to stop breathing. Maybe you'd want to stop noticing your breathing, which you'll do as soon as I stop drawing your attention to it.
I'd suggest that the repetitive activities which are allowed to not be boring fall into two categories:
Let me talk about that second category:
Suppose you were unraveling the true laws of physics and discovering all sorts of neat stuff you hadn't known before... when suddenly you got bored with "changing your beliefs based on observation". You are sick of anything resembling "Bayesian updating"—it feels like playing the same video game over and over. Instead you decide to believe anything said on 4chan.
Or to put it another way, suppose that you were something like a sentient chessplayer—a sentient version of Deep Blue. Like a modern human, you have no introspective access to your own algorithms. Each chess game appears different—you play new opponents and steer into new positions, composing new strategies, avoiding new enemy gambits. You are content, and not at all bored; you never appear to yourself to be doing the same thing twice—it's a different chess game each time.
But now, suddenly, you gain access to, and understanding of, your own chess-playing program. Not just the raw code; you can monitor its execution. You can see that it's actually the same damn code, doing the same damn thing, over and over and over again. Run the same damn position evaluator. Run the same damn sorting algorithm to order the branches. Pick the top branch, again. Extend it one position forward, again. Call the same damn subroutine and start over.
I have a small unreasonable fear, somewhere in the back of my mind, that if I ever do fully understand the algorithms of intelligence, it will destroy all remaining novelty—no matter what new situation I encounter, I'll know I can solve it just by being intelligent, the same damn thing over and over. All novelty will be used up, all existence will become boring, the remaining differences no more important than shades of pixels in a video game. Other beings will go about in blissful unawareness, having been steered away from studying this forbidden cognitive science. But I, having already thrown myself on the grenade of AI, will face a choice between eternal boredom, or excision of my forbidden knowledge and all the memories leading up to it (thereby destroying my existence as Eliezer, more or less).
Now this, mind you, is not my predictive line of maximum probability. To understand abstractly what rough sort of work the brain is doing, doesn't let you monitor its detailed execution as a boring repetition. I already know about Bayesian updating, yet I haven't become bored with the act of learning. And a self-editing mind can quite reasonably exclude certain levels of introspection from boredom, just like breathing can be legitimately excluded from boredom. (Maybe these top-level cognitive algorithms ought also to be excluded from perception—if something is stable, why bother seeing it all the time?)
No, it's just a cute little nightmare, which I thought made a nice illustration of this proposed principle:
That the very top-level things (like Bayesian updating, or attaching value to sentient minds rather than paperclips) and the very low-level things (like breathing, or switching transistors) are the things we shouldn't get bored with. And the mid-level things between, are where we should seek novelty. (To a first approximation, the novel is the inverse of the learned; it's something with a learnable element not yet covered by previous insights.)
Now this is probably not exactly how our current emotional circuitry of boredom works. That, I expect, would be hardwired relative to various sensory-level definitions of predictability, surprisingness, repetition, attentional salience, and perceived effortfulness.
But this is Fun Theory, so we are mainly concerned with how boredom should work in the long run.
Humanity acquired boredom the same way as we acquired the rest of our emotions: the godshatter idiom whereby evolution's instrumental policies became our own terminal values, pursued for their own sake: sex is fun even if you use birth control. Evolved aliens might, or might not, acquire roughly the same boredom in roughly the same way.
Do not give into the temptation of universalizing anthropomorphic values, and think: "But any rational agent, regardless of its utility function, will face the exploration/exploitation tradeoff, and will therefore occasionally get bored with exploiting, and go exploring."
Our emotion of boredom is a way of exploring, but not the only way for an ideal optimizing agent.
The idea of a steady trickle of mid-level novelty is a human terminal value, not something we do for the sake of something else. Evolution might have originally given it to us in order to have us explore as well as exploit. But now we explore for its own sake. That steady trickle of novelty is a terminal value to us; it is not the most efficient instrumental method for exploring and exploiting.
Suppose you were dealing with something like an expected paperclip maximizer—something that might use quite complicated instrumental policies, but in the service of a utility function that we would regard as simple, with a single term compactly defined.
Then I would expect the exploration/exploitation tradeoff to go something like as follows: The paperclip maximizer would assign some resources to cognition that searched for more efficient ways to make paperclips, or harvest resources from stars. Other resources would be devoted to the actual harvesting and paperclip-making. (The paperclip-making might not start until after a long phase of harvesting.) At every point, the most efficient method yet discovered—for resource-harvesting, or paperclip-making—would be used, over and over and over again. It wouldn't be boring, just maximally instrumentally efficient.
In the beginning, lots of resources would go into preparing for efficient work over the rest of time. But as cognitive resources yielded diminishing returns in the abstract search for efficiency improvements, less and less time would be spent thinking, and more and more time spent creating paperclips. By whatever the most efficient known method, over and over and over again.
(Do human beings get less easily bored as we grow older, more tolerant of repetition, because any further discoveries are less valuable, because we have less time left to exploit them?)
If we run into aliens who don't share our version of boredom—a steady trickle of mid-level novelty as a terminal preference—then perhaps every alien throughout their civilization will just be playing the most exciting level of the most exciting video game ever discovered, over and over and over again. Maybe with nonsentient AIs taking on the drudgework of searching for a more exciting video game. After all, without an inherent preference for novelty, exploratory attempts will usually have less expected value than exploiting the best policy previously encountered. And that's if you explore by trial at all, as opposed to using more abstract and efficient thinking.
Or if the aliens are rendered non-bored by seeing pixels of a slightly different shade—if their definition of sameness is more specific than ours, and their boredom less general—then from our perspective, most of their civilization will be doing the human::same thing over and over again, and hence, be very human::boring.
Or maybe if the aliens have no fear of life becoming too simple and repetitive, they'll just collapse themselves into orgasmium.
And if our version of boredom is less strict than that of the aliens, maybe they'd take one look at one day in the life of one member of our civilization, and never bother looking at the rest of us. From our perspective, their civilization would be needlessly chaotic, and so entropic, lower in what we regard as quality; they wouldn't play the same game for long enough to get good at it.
But if our versions of boredom are similar enough —terminal preference for a stream of mid-level novelty defined relative to learning insights not previously possessed—then we might find our civilizations mutually worthy of tourism. Each new piece of alien art would strike us as lawfully creative, high-quality according to a recognizable criterion, yet not like the other art we've already seen.
It is one of the things that would make our two species ramen rather than varelse, to invoke the Hierarchy of Exclusion. And I've never seen anyone define those two terms well, including Orson Scott Card who invented them; but it might be something like "aliens you can get along with, versus aliens for which there is no reason to bother trying".