Thread by @IntuitMachine

Humans have an inclination to find additive solutions over subtractive solutions. But I must ask, how do you arrive at emergent subtractive solutions via a collective consensus mechanism? nature.com/articles/d4158…

The reason bureaucracies become more complex is that it's easier to get consensus on adding something new than removing something old.

Even in the realm of biological evolution, additive solutions is the more pervasive solution. Only through creative destruction do we actually do see subtractive solutions.

However, organism development and growth is not only additive processes but also a subtractive one. A pluripotent stem cell just happens to be expressible in so many surprising ways.

Are collective subtractive processes only possible through a kind of pluripotency?

Classical reality is constructed via a subtractive pluripotent quantum reality. It's just counter-intuitive, but that's the nature of reality.

What about consciousness and attention? Are they not also subtractive processes? How does our mind gravitate to a single sequence of thoughts even when there is a boundless multitude of concerns that are present in everyday perception?

Subtractive methods are in fact a superset to the notion of forgetting. How is it that humans leverage forgetting to create more powerful and more useful abstractions?

The weakness of Artificial Neural Networks is their inability to systematically forget. This is also related to the inability of these networks to also systematically create new abstractions.

An abstraction process is also a subtractive process. Neural networks do not create simple models of this world because they are essentially a collective additive process.

Christopher Alexander in the formulation of design noticed the importance of not only additive processes but subtractive processes as well.

But what is it about subtractive processes that are so difficult? Well, have you ever wondered why every time you move to a new home that you accumulated even more junk?

Why don't you just get rid of the stuff you don't use? Well, it's because you just don't know if you'll ever use again the stuff you rarely use. I guess it's time for me to consult Marie Kondo to see if any of her principles might be enlightening.

Managing technical debt is a subtractive process. Garbage collecting memory that has no references is a subtractive process. Death itself is a subtractive process.

To effectively perform a subtractive process requires that decisions are made across many different scopes. This is quite unlike a bottom-up consensus mechanism.

A consensus must be made across multiple scales in space and scales in time. Furthermore, it is a destructive process where progress erases the past.

In short, it is damn hard and unfortunately, biological brains tend towards what takes the least effort. Which is indeed the paradox. What usually takes the least effort requires less and not more.