Grassland: “Truth” is the Emergent Property of Consensus Between Intelligent Observers

For any set of agents in a trustless system, the only representation that can be considered factual or “true” is that description of events which provides the least amount of discrepancy between their independent observations

The nice thing about having to define the difference between fact or fiction for machines is it forces you to think about what truth actually means in a much more rational and mathematical sense. Making no assumptions, only so far as machines are concerned. Since you have to start from scratch, i.e. first principles, so the machine can understand it.

You then inevitably arrive back at the observer. And you look at the degree of correspondence between their assessment of the environment (by environment I mean some fitness function as it concerns the observer) and the degree to which their internal evaluation framework can predict the outcome of that fitness function.

And you have to define that as being “truth”. There doesn’t seem to be any other way around it. Because try as we might we can’t get outside of our own experience. Therefore our imagination is our experience. They’re one and the same.

And you end up treading over the ground Donald Hoffman laid out in his work. An introduction to it is here -> https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-evolutionary-argument-against-reality-20160421/

The word “environment” makes it seems as though the real fitness function is something external to the observer. Happening on the outside. But it doesn’t have to be. That’s an unnecessary assumption. You don’t need the existence of an objective reality that’s external to the observers to make Grassland work any more than you need it for Deep Schizophrenia. It’s entirely superfluous. And Hoffman argues that you don’t need it to make human or biological agents “work” either

It’s like the ether. During the period Einstein wrote the paper that gave us E=mc², many physicists believed this substance called the ether permeated the universe and was the medium light and gravity propagated through. Then Einstein gave us a universe that didn’t need it. Maybe it exists. Maybe it doesn’t. But as far as our understanding of physics goes, it’s not necessary at all.