Stepping stones in possibility space An Article by Gordon Brander subconscious.substack.com If we try to cross this lake by following only the stepping stones that lead toward our objective, we’ll soon get stuck. But what if we let go of our objectives? What if we focused on trying to find new stepping stones instead? This is novelty search. Instead of looking for something specific, you look for something new. Novelty search isn’t just random, it’s chance plus memory. Together, these ingredients do something interesting. ...Stepping stones are also combinatorial. Each new stepping stone we discover expands our potential to find even more stepping stones. Collecting stepping stones is a luck maximization algorithm. By collecting and combining stepping stones, we might arrive at our destination by accident, or somewhere more interesting! chanceknowledgeprogressnoveltyevolutioninvention
Apologia A Chapter from A Search for Structure by Cyril Stanley Smith If the features of many are comparedPebbles on the beachHalf-formed perceptionInterdisciplinary
If the features of many are compared Almost all fields today are concerned in one way or another with hierarchical structure, and a theory, or perhaps more usefully a metaphor, common to all may emerge if the features of many are compared. Though the units in different fields are different, in all of them meaning comes through communication: patterns of communication are common to all, with aggregation leading to diversity or unity, and the clumps of unity themselves serving in turn as units in larger structrures based on more complex but still direct communication. hierarchystructure
Pebbles on the beach Newton picked up the pebbles on his metaphoric beach with an intellectual objective in mind, but his ancestor in paleolithic times picked up real minerals because he enjoyed looking at them: quite inadvertently he started the chain of practice and craftsmanship and thought that led to the diversity of specialized materials and generalized theory today. More like the early Homo sapiens than the sixteenth-century intellectual giant I have enjoyed a life of rather undisciplined wandering and search. searchcuriosity
Half-formed perception Science must be simple, yet the human brain has a structure that gives it the capacity for relating to the world in its undivided complexity in ways that are not logical, though they are effective. Aesthetic interest aroused by observation and half-formed perception seems usually, perhaps always, to precede exact analysis. intuitioncognition
Interdisciplinary These papers are probably to be called interdisciplinary—an “in” word these days—but any value they may have derives from the fact that the author started with a rather deep immersion in a single discipline. One cannot hope to understand the nature of interaction between impinging areas without a firm knowledge of at least one of them. knowledgescience