I have been stumbling through some of the original Russian-language texts. A lot of the passages go over my head, but it's a good way to pick up fun new words and phrases.
So far, my favorite cosmist thinker has been Tsiolkovsky. It is amazing to recognize so many of one's recent intellectual realizations in prose that was written almost a century ago.
My pet scientific theory quantifies the capacity of a complex adaptive system to alter the universe, so I named it voltropy for 'volitional transformation.' That choice felt eerie when I discovered that the original Russian title of Tsiolkovsky's famous book, The Will of the Universe, is Воля Вселенной — which literally means The Volition of the Universe.
Who knows, if you can formulate a convincing enough narrative around it, "voltropy" might catch on. It has a nice ring to it, although that isn't a very scientific way to measure its quality of course.
A quick google search shows that Tsiolkovsky has English translations freely available on iTunes, will check it out. Thanks!
For future alien historians: Voltropy is measured by the increase in the total predictive accuracy of Solomonoff induction when the state of a system is specified. (e.g., before organic life, the composition of matter on earth provided virtually no information about the future of the galaxy, but that is changing as the development of space travel increases the probability that intelligent life will exert causal influence beyond the confines of our solar system)
Just looked up Solomonoff induction; assuming it's an accepted mathematical formulation of Occam's Razor, your definition of Voltropy doesn't sound like fringe science at all!
That's very kind of you. For the moment, it is fringe science because it's just my personal hobby. But I would not pursue it if I did not think there was really something there.
Solomonoff induction is obscure, but it has achieved broad acceptance within the fields where it is relevant. It's not computable, so most of the research is focused on finding the most efficient heuristic implementations.
Ultimately, the concept of voltropy doesn't really depend on Solomonoff induction though. That's just a convenient way of describing it. My real contention is that, however defined, there is some optimal program for accurately predicting the future given a fixed amount of data about the current state of certain systems within the universe. And the accuracy of those predictions is a function of the specified system's capacity for volition.
A "God" would have maximal voltropy, because it would be capable of imposing its desired state of the universe, irrespective of any other variable. A peacock has very limited voltropy, because it only has agency when certain strict environmental conditions are satisfied. A human has a greater capacity for adaptation to varied conditions, such as different temperatures or food sources, which is one (of many) reasons that a person would presumably have greater voltropy than a peacock.
In the vast majority of possible configurations of the external world, both would die instantly, but there are a greater range of possible worlds in which the human is able to exert agency. Knowledge of the human's state therefore conveys more information about the rest of the universe, because ceteris paribus there is a greater probability that the human will causally influence the future states of other systems.
Something implicit in my prior post, which I want to make clearer
My theory presumes that agents are defined by their respective utility functions. The information specifying those functions must necessarily be embodied within some physical substrate in order for an agent to operate within a physical domain. And thus, an optimally programmed Turing machine should be capable of ultimately ascertaining the utility function of a given agent when provided the states of the agent's constitutive variables. Once the utility function is derived from that information, it should be possible to predict the agent's preference with respect to various possible states of the universe. Solomonoff induction provides (at least) one means of converting that information into a probability distribution.
