(First draft rough notes on an important idea)
So, the essence of my thought was that in the same way that Claude Shannon operationalized communication between two entities in “a mathematical theory of communication”, which describes physical systems, yet actually says something fundamental about the mathematical nature and limits of the transmission of information itself which is rigorous and provable (i.e., it talks about things like transmitters, encoders and decoders, transmission channels, and noise, but derives fundamental quantities like Shannon entropy, the maximum number of transmissible bits under various conditions, etc.);
In a similar way, you could have a mathematical theory of optimal experience which mathematically operationalizes the relationships and trade-offs between several variables fundamental to optimal experience.
As an approximation of the qualia environment being examined, we could imagine a videogame being experienced from the inside, with each of the pixels instead replaced with single units of qualia, perhaps a quexel instead of a pixel or voxel, or a mote of qualia if you prefer. Quexels could be visual, auditory, taste, smell, or tactile quexels (or other yet undiscovered categories), and can have positive and negative valence, and can be grouped together in large or small quale and fields of qualia, in different shaped agents with different sized memories and imaginations.
Some of the variables you may want to include when analyzing and evaluating these qualia in a mathematical theory of optimal experience:
-
volume of qualia
- total volume of qualia
- average qualia size
- distribution of size of qualia
-
hedonic valence
- net valence
- average valence
- average height of valence (100 of valence 1, versus 1 of valence 100)
- distribution of valence
- ratio of positive to negative valence
-
choice
- number and density of real choices (where agents choices are substantive and not predetermined)
- number and density of perceived choices (where there is subjective choice yet the choice may be in fact forced by predetermined factors)
- what percent of choices, weighted by importance effectively achieved predetermined objectives
-
diversity of experience
- total number of different configurations of qualia experienced
- total distance in Word2vec of set of objects simultaneously experienced from each other (or other measurements of distance in concept space)
-
how much diversity can be remembered for comparison/appreciation of current experience
- how fine grained memories are
- number of quexels per memory
- how many memories can be stored
Okay geez, this brief summary got a bit longer than I intended. Anyway, the main point I wanted to make was that if you imagine this as a videogame, since we don’t yet know how to compute qualia, a lot of these quantities are things that have real world computational costs and depending on how you want to structure game have real trade-offs.
For any given set of resources you could in principle enumerate all the possible organizations of qualia, and then calculate what these trade-offs are at the limit, and precisely how much marginal increases in one parameter would force you to decrease other parameters.
Then rather than vaguely handwaving about whether hedonic valence or choice or diversity etc. are more important for optimal experience, we could precisely quantify the trade-offs between these so that we can all agree on at least what exactly does trade-offs quantitatively are, e.g. given a certain set of qualia increasing the number of choices available by 2X would require you to reduce positive valence by 10%, or whatever, and then you could have more precise disagreements on marginal trade-off metrics, and even perhaps discover that you actually agree when you thought you disagreed, because the actual trade-offs that are available within a certain set of qualia are something which both its of preferences are willing to accept because one party is getting a much better deal than they thought they were.
I could write a lot more, I have many dozens of pages of notes on utopia etc., but that’s kind of the basics of this piece of the idea which I just thought of
Jordan Arel 