I want to compile a list of topics that could help inspire formal/mathematical abstractions for boundaries/membranes. (See my recent explainer.)
What technical topics are related to boundaries/membranes?
I've seeded the comments with some ideas. Please keep further comments organized in threads if possible. Also, please add high quality links to existing comments by others.
Cyborgism (for empowering membranes / making them better at defending themselves)
Also Capabilitarianism
Does anyone have good links for these^?
thx to friend:
The key scholars are Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. SEP is a good place to get oriented: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/capability-approach/
Related, quantum information theory:
Great initiative !
I've always been intrigued by Andrew Critch's suggestion that the problem of commitment races in game theory and other forms of threats may be 'resolved' by thinking in terms of boundaries as natural BATNA points
The concept of “separation of tasks” from Adlerian Psychology. This is where many of my intuitions originally came from. This isn't technical though.
Psychology may not be "technical enough" because an adequate mathematical science or process theory is not developed for it, yet, but it's ultimately very important, perhaps critically important: see the last paragraph of https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AKBkDNeFLZxaMqjQG/gaia-network-a-practical-incremental-pathway-to-open-agency. Davidad apparently thinks that it can be captured with an Infra-Bayesian model of a person/human.
Also on psychology: what is the boundary of personality, where just a "role" (spouse, worker, etc) turns into multiple-personality disorder?
Related, consciousness frame: where is the boundary of it? Is our brain conscious, or the whole nervous system, or the whole human, or the whole human + the entire microbiome populating them, or human + robotic prosthetic limbs, or human + web search + chat AI + personal note taking app, or the whole human group (collective consciousness), etc.
Some computational theories of consciousness attempt to give a specific, mathematically formalised answer to this question.
Non-technical topics thread
(This all seems very Sante Fe. Anything from the Sante Fe Institute to link?)
In the most recent episode of his podcast show, Jim Rutt (former president of SFI) and his guest talk about membranes a lot, the word appears 30 times on a transcript page: https://www.jimruttshow.com/cody-moser/
Computer security
Related, consciousness frame: where is the boundary of it? Is our brain conscious, or the whole nervous system, or the whole human, or the whole human + the entire microbiome populating them, or human + robotic prosthetic limbs, or human + web search + chat AI + personal note taking app, or the whole human group (collective consciousness), etc.
Some computational theories of consciousness attempt to give a specific, mathematically formalised answer to this question.