Today's post, Optimization was originally published on 13 September 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
A discussion of the concept of optimization.
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Psychic Powers, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
Using that definition very few things that humans do count as optimization, and virtually nothing our brains do counts. For instance my brain doesn't till a field and plant seeds and harvest grain; my muscles twitch to make my bones and skin exert forces on a plow and seeds and grains, and the sun and plants do the vast majority of the work. My brain just happens to be the thing that sets the initial process in motion and tweaks it along the way.
Of course maybe since this was just a preliminary article that's fine, and a study of "intelligence" would focus on the parts of the optimization process that, if removed, would stop it from being an optimization process. I still think, however, that you can't just take the most favorable starting state and evaluate the results after some period of time, e.g. an unmanned oil refinery with a pipe connected to an infinite reserve of uniform crude oil on one side, a wire with an infinite reserve of electrical potential on another side, and an output connected to an infinitely empty tank for refined petroleum. You have to look at the likely starting states and calculate a probability distribution over the possible final states. In that sense an oil refinery might optimize over a period of a day or so, given current conditions. But current conditions are far from likely; there are trucks (or rail cars, or pipeline contents) on their way to the refinery for tomorrow, and more transport scheduled to empty its product tanks. The refinery, as a single object, is a very limited optimizing process. If placed on any random flat stable area on Earth's surface it would be nearly useless. Infrastructure matters.
There's an anthropic or self-referential kind of argument for most things having some optimizing value, however. The likelihood of finding a refinery randomly placed on the Earth or in the Universe is incredibly low, probably lower than the probability of it having zero utility at a random place in the Universe. The more complex an optimizing process is, the more likely it is to be found where it can be most optimal. Something to think about is the conditional probability P(this-process-is-optimizing | this-process-exists). I suspect it's very close to 1 for very optimal processes. It's basically the probability of evolution happening, I guess.
Your brain is a causal component of the optimization processes; therefore it seems fair to give it credit. If I take away your plow, it seems reasonable to conclude that your optimization would be less effective, but not ineffective. If I take away your brain, it seems reasonable to conclude that the plow would lose all optimization power. It seems reasonable to conclude from this that your brain has more optimization power, even within that limited context, than the plow does. Sorting out optimization power of your brain vs the plants is difficult for the... (read more)