Ultimate values

Life (or mechanical life like Asa H) has as its most fundamental values reproductive success and lifespan (survival).  (see my blogs of 21 Sept. 2010 and 19 Feb. 2011)  Agents occupy a volume in space-time.  Perhaps they should strive to occupy (or exert influence over) more space, not just have longer duration (lifespan). Life that is widely distributed has a better chance of survival if something happens to one of its habitats. Perhaps spreading out over space should be one of our ultimate values.  i.e. life spreads. If enacted, such a value would encourage work on space travel.

Simple Langmuir probe interfacing software

Probe drive circuit

Langmuir probe sweep circuit

Plasma physics experiments for the undergraduate advanced lab

The following lab was created in 1982.  I still use it but with the NL-OA4GA tube.

Intelligence and values

How intelligent you are depends upon how good your value system is.  If you have bad values you make bad decisions.

The human value system appears to be a kludge made up of a set of simple drives and aversions.  A better value system might be something like the network in my 21 Sept. 2010 blog.

formal systems <-----> informal description, a continuum

A good example of a formal system would be executables like my Asa H 2.0 lite (see my 10 Feb. 2011 post for a listing).

A good example of an informal description of (roughly) the same system is my graph in my 29 Sept. 2010 post. (One could make it more formal by adding details about what each node of the graph does, or by listing what quantities are sent from one node to another and when.)

A good example of a description that is less formal than executable code but more formal than my graph would be the equation set given in my 2006 paper on Asa H (Trans. Kansas Acad. Sci., Vol 109, # 3/4, pg 159).