The Nonlinear Library LW - A Crisper Explanation of Simulacrum Levels by Thane Ruthenis
Dec 24, 2023
20:29
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: A Crisper Explanation of Simulacrum Levels, published by Thane Ruthenis on December 24, 2023 on LessWrong.
I've read the previous work on Simulacrum Levels, and I've seen people express some confusion regarding how they work. I'd had some of those confusions myself when I first encountered the concept, and I think they were caused by insufficiently crisp definitions.
The extant explanations didn't seem like they offered a proper bottom-up/fundamentals-first mechanism for how simulacrum levels come to exist. Why do they have the specific features and quirks that they have, and not any others? Why is the form that's being ascribed to them the inevitable form that they take, rather than arbitrary? Why can't Level 4 agents help but act psychopathic? Why is there no Level 5?
I'd eventually formed a novel-seeming model of how they work, and it now occurs to me that it may be useful for others as well (though I'd formed it years ago).
It aims to preserve all the important features of @Zvi's definitions while explicating them by fitting a proper gears-level mechanistic explanation to them. I think there are some marginal differences regarding where I draw the boundaries, but it should still essentially agree with Zvi's.
Groundwork
In some contexts, recursion levels become effectively indistinguishable past recursion level 3. Not exactly a new idea, but it's central to my model, so I'll include an example for completeness' sake.
Consider the case of cognition.
Cognition is thinking about external objects and processes. "This restaurant is too cramped."
Metacognition is building your model of your own thinking. What biases it might have, how to reason about object-level topics better. "I feel that this restaurant is too cramped because I dislike large groups of people."
Meta-metacognittion is analysing your model of yourself: whether you're inclined to embellish or cover up certain parts of your personality, etc. "I'm telling myself the story about disliking large groups of people because it feels like a more glamorous explanation for disliking this restaurant than the real one. I dislike it out of contrariness: there are many people here because it's popular, and I instinctively dislike things that are mainstream."
Meta-meta-metacognition would, then, be "thinking about your analyses of your self-centered biases". But that's just meta-metacognition again: analysing how you're inclined to see yourself. "I'm engaging in complicated thinking about the way I think about myself because I want to maintain the self-image of a clever, self-aware person."
There is a similar case for meta-metacognition being the same thing as metacognition, but I think there's a slight difference between levels 2 and 3 that isn't apparent between 3 and 4 onward.[1]
Next: In basically any society, there are three distinct "frameworks" one operates with: physical reality, other people, and the social reality. Each subsequent framework contains a recursive model of the previous one:
The physical reality is.
People contain their own models of reality.
People's social images are other people's models of a person: i. e., models of models of reality.[2]
Recursion levels 1, 2, and 3. There's no meaningful "level 4" here: "a model of a person's social image" means "the perception of a person's appearance", which is still just "a person's appearance". You can get into some caveats here, but it doesn't change much[3].
Any signal is thus viewed in each of these frameworks, giving rise to three kinds of meaning any signal can communicate:
What it literally says: viewed in the context of the physical reality.
What you think the speaker is trying to convince you of, and why: viewed in the context of your model of the speaker.
How it affects your and the speaker's social images: viewed in the context of your model of ...
I've read the previous work on Simulacrum Levels, and I've seen people express some confusion regarding how they work. I'd had some of those confusions myself when I first encountered the concept, and I think they were caused by insufficiently crisp definitions.
The extant explanations didn't seem like they offered a proper bottom-up/fundamentals-first mechanism for how simulacrum levels come to exist. Why do they have the specific features and quirks that they have, and not any others? Why is the form that's being ascribed to them the inevitable form that they take, rather than arbitrary? Why can't Level 4 agents help but act psychopathic? Why is there no Level 5?
I'd eventually formed a novel-seeming model of how they work, and it now occurs to me that it may be useful for others as well (though I'd formed it years ago).
It aims to preserve all the important features of @Zvi's definitions while explicating them by fitting a proper gears-level mechanistic explanation to them. I think there are some marginal differences regarding where I draw the boundaries, but it should still essentially agree with Zvi's.
Groundwork
In some contexts, recursion levels become effectively indistinguishable past recursion level 3. Not exactly a new idea, but it's central to my model, so I'll include an example for completeness' sake.
Consider the case of cognition.
Cognition is thinking about external objects and processes. "This restaurant is too cramped."
Metacognition is building your model of your own thinking. What biases it might have, how to reason about object-level topics better. "I feel that this restaurant is too cramped because I dislike large groups of people."
Meta-metacognittion is analysing your model of yourself: whether you're inclined to embellish or cover up certain parts of your personality, etc. "I'm telling myself the story about disliking large groups of people because it feels like a more glamorous explanation for disliking this restaurant than the real one. I dislike it out of contrariness: there are many people here because it's popular, and I instinctively dislike things that are mainstream."
Meta-meta-metacognition would, then, be "thinking about your analyses of your self-centered biases". But that's just meta-metacognition again: analysing how you're inclined to see yourself. "I'm engaging in complicated thinking about the way I think about myself because I want to maintain the self-image of a clever, self-aware person."
There is a similar case for meta-metacognition being the same thing as metacognition, but I think there's a slight difference between levels 2 and 3 that isn't apparent between 3 and 4 onward.[1]
Next: In basically any society, there are three distinct "frameworks" one operates with: physical reality, other people, and the social reality. Each subsequent framework contains a recursive model of the previous one:
The physical reality is.
People contain their own models of reality.
People's social images are other people's models of a person: i. e., models of models of reality.[2]
Recursion levels 1, 2, and 3. There's no meaningful "level 4" here: "a model of a person's social image" means "the perception of a person's appearance", which is still just "a person's appearance". You can get into some caveats here, but it doesn't change much[3].
Any signal is thus viewed in each of these frameworks, giving rise to three kinds of meaning any signal can communicate:
What it literally says: viewed in the context of the physical reality.
What you think the speaker is trying to convince you of, and why: viewed in the context of your model of the speaker.
How it affects your and the speaker's social images: viewed in the context of your model of ...