At some point essentially everything of value is going to be abstract computation, and anything outside of that will be either noise or fully understood, the physical substrate. It’s not clear how that abstract computation should be structured, but the experience from engineering of the physical systems or communication technologies, the classical ways of understanding the physical world, isn’t obviously that relevant for agent foundations.
Even if all value is in computations (eg. everyone lives inside simulations), wouldn’t you have the same problems, just one level down? The physical world may be a type of computation and the computations may resemble the physical world.
It’s an argument from cosmic normality, about the scope of applicability of such methods. Like medicine or biology, the relevance is a temporary accident of the current phase of human condition. I’m not sure how natural the impression of overclaiming applicability of physics, statistics, information theory, or machine learning is, perhaps this is quite clear already.
The point is that these things are not obviously at all relevant to the nature of agency, or values. You could in principle have frail human biological bodies within a simulated world, and practice medicine on them, but that’s hardly a central thing that happens in a post-computronium world.
At some point essentially everything of value is going to be abstract computation, and anything outside of that will be either noise or fully understood, the physical substrate. It’s not clear how that abstract computation should be structured, but the experience from engineering of the physical systems or communication technologies, the classical ways of understanding the physical world, isn’t obviously that relevant for agent foundations.
Even if all value is in computations (eg. everyone lives inside simulations), wouldn’t you have the same problems, just one level down? The physical world may be a type of computation and the computations may resemble the physical world.
It’s an argument from cosmic normality, about the scope of applicability of such methods. Like medicine or biology, the relevance is a temporary accident of the current phase of human condition. I’m not sure how natural the impression of overclaiming applicability of physics, statistics, information theory, or machine learning is, perhaps this is quite clear already.
The point is that these things are not obviously at all relevant to the nature of agency, or values. You could in principle have frail human biological bodies within a simulated world, and practice medicine on them, but that’s hardly a central thing that happens in a post-computronium world.