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SCAL Field Notes

Rough info dump, personal thoughts, in no particular order.

  1. Design the conditions, never the behaviour.
  2. SCAL is a minefield. 99% of positive results are likely to be illusions. Every apparent success should survive trial by fire before it is treated seriously.
  3. Autopoiesis, ouroboros in silicon.
  4. Always watch your back, don't loop and fall back into the "engineering" trap (keep reminding yourself). Your goal is to distance yourself when working with SCAL, leave minimal fingerprints.
  5. Anthropogenic/human made intelligent design < true intelligent design (nature/universe). We (humans) do not need to reinvent the wheel, not that we even remotely can (if humans are so "intelligent", and we're so "advanced", then why can't we "engineer" a perfect brain), everything already exists inside our universe, we just need to understand how to harness it (point 1). Basically approach SCAL with the cliché "I know that I know nothing" mindset.
  6. Coupling law, good to know: If renaming the symbols changes the physics, the symbols contain imposed semantics.
  7. Find the coupling law, avoid engineering it if possible. It's a step by step process, you have to start somewhere.
  8. I didn't set out to work in artificial life. My original goal was to engineer a brain from the bottom up by scaling artificial neurons. Even after reaching billions of neurons on a laptop, the project eventually collapsed under its own complexity. Too many variables, too many moving parts, and a growing realisation that engineering a brain is fundamentally different from understanding one. I stepped back and began exploring artificial life instead. Google's 2024 opcode work stood out because of its simplicity, but after stripping it down even further I realised I had simply recreated the same engineering trap in a different form. I was still searching for a needle in an infinite universe. That was the moment I understood I wasn't looking for a better engineered system. I was looking for a different question. SCAL emerged from that change in perspective.
  9. The goal is to get more eyes on SCAL and motivate others to give it a shot. Being the "smartest person in the room" is a trap that halts growth. There's a lot of talent out there, opinions matter. Without that, you're likely to get trapped inside your own thoughts, especially if you focus too heavily on one thing for long enough (zoomed in without ever zooming out to re-evaluate). Given enough time, the same thing will also likely happen to others, but at least it would be possible to connect the dots and break past walls/find solutions later on as a collective. That will lead to progress. One mind < many unique minds + perspectives + boxes.
  10. Nature is radically simple.
  11. All three pillars should be active under one roof always (in terms of silicon), not this or that individually. Do not segregate them, that's a dead end.
  12. Think big and ask presumably stupid questions when looking for answers (especially the really stupid ones).