About the classification thing: Agree that it’s very important that a general AI be able to classify entities into “dumb machines” and things complex enough to be self-aware, warrant an intentional stance and require ethical consideration. Even putting aside the ethical concerns, being able to recognize complex agents with intentions and model their intentions instead of their most likely massively complex physical machinery is probably vital to any sort of meaningful ability to act in a social domain with many other complex agents (cf. Dennett’s intentional stance)
The latter has, to my knowledge, never been done. Arguably, the latter task requires different ability which the scanner may not have. The former requires acquiring a bitmap and using image recognition. It has already been done with simple images such as parallel black and white lines, but I don’t know whether bitmaps or image recognition were involved in that. If the cat is a problem, let’s simplify the image to the black and white lines.
I understood the existing image reconstruction experiments measure the activation on the visual cortex when the subject is actually viewing an image, which does indeed get you a straightforward mapping to a bitmap. This isn’t the same as thinking about a cat, a person could be thinking about a cat while not looking at one, and they could have a cat in their visual field while daydreaming or suffering from hysterical blindness, so that they weren’t thinking about a cat despite having a cat image correctly show up in their visual cortex scan.
I don’t actually know what the neural correlate of thinking about a cat, as opposed to having one’s visual cortex activated by looking at one, would be like, but I was assuming interpreting it would require much more sophisticated understanding of the brain, basically at the level of difficult of telling whether a brain scan correlates with thinking about freedom, a theory of gravity or reciprocality. Basically something that’s entirely beyond current neuroscience and more indicative of some sort of Laplace’s demon like thought experiment where you can actually observe and understand the whole mechanical ensemble of the brain.
But RP is about the understanding a consciousness could attain of itself. Such an understanding could not be deterministic within the viewpoint of that consciousness. That would be like trying to have a map contain itself.
Quines are maps that contain themselves. A quining system could reflect on its entire static structure, though it would have to run some sort of emulation slower than its physical substrate to predict its future states. Hofstadter’s GEB links quines to reflection in AI.
Well, that’s supposed to be a good thing, because there are supposed to be none. But saying that might not help. If you don’t know what consciousness or the experience of reality mean in my use (perhaps because you would reduce such experiences to theoretical models of physical entities and states of neural networks), you will probably not understand what I’m doing. That would suggest you cannot conceptualize idealistic ontology or you believe “mind” to refer to an empty set.
“There aren’t any assumptions” is just a plain non-starter. There’s the natural language we’re using that’s used to present the theory and ground the concepts in the theory, and natural language basically carries a billion years of evolution leading to the three billion base pair human genome loaded with accidental complexity, leading to something from ten to a hundred thousand years of human cultural evolution with even more accidental complexity that probably gets us something in the ballpark of 100 megabytes irreducible complexity from the human DNA that you need to build up a newborn brain and another 100 megabytes (going by the heuristic of one bit of permanently learned knowledge per one second) for the kernel of the cultural stuff a human needs to learn from their perceptions to be able to competently deal with concepts like “income tax” or “calculus”. You get both of those for free when talking with other people, and neither when trying to build an AGI-grade theory of the mind.
This is also why I spelled out the trivial basic assumptions I’m working from (and probably did a very poor job at actually conveying the whole idea complex). When you start doing set theory, I assume we’re dealing with things at the complexity of mathematical objects. Then you throw in something like “anthropology” as an element in a set, and I, still in math mode, start going, whaa, you need humans before you have anthropology, and you need the billion years of evolution leading to the accidental complexity in humans to have humans, and you need physics to have the humans live and run the societies for anthropology to study, and you need the rest of the biosphere for the humans to not just curl up and die in the featureless vacuum and, and.. and that’s a lot of math. While the actual system with the power sets looks just like uniform, featureless soup to me. Sure, there are all the labels, which make my brain do the above i-don’t-get-it dance, but the thing I’m actually looking for is the mathematical structure. And that’s just really simple, nowhere near what you’d need to model a loose cloud of hydrogen floating in empty space, not to mention something many orders of magnitude more complex like a society of human beings.
My confusion about the assumptions is basically that I get the sense that analytic philosophers seem to operate like they could just write the name of some complex human concept, like “morality”, then throw in some math notation like modal logic, quantified formulas and set memberships, and call it a day. But what I’m expecting is something that teaches me how to program a computer to do mind-stuff, and a computer won’t have the corresponding mental concept for the word “morality” like a human has, since the human has the ~200M special sauce kernel which gives them that. And I hardly ever see philosophers talking about this bit.
A theory of mind that can actually do the work needs to build up the same sort of kernel evolution and culture have set up for people. For the human ballpark estimate, you’d have to fill something like 100 000 pages with math, all setting up the basic machinery you need for the mind to get going. A very abstracted out theory of mind could no doubt cut off an order of magnitude or two out of that, but something like Maxwell’s equations on a single sheet of paper won’t do. It isn’t answering the question of how you’d tell a computer how to be a mind, and that’s the question I keep looking at this stuff with.
It isn’t answering the question of how you’d tell a computer how to be a mind, and that’s the question I keep looking at this stuff with.
There are many ways to answer that question. I have a flowchart and formulae. The opposite of that would be something to the effect of having the source code. I’m not sure why you expect me to have that. Was it something I said?
I thought I’ve given you links to my actual work, but I can’t find them. Did I forget? Hmm...
If you dislike metaphysics, only the latter is for you. I can’t paste the content, because the formatting on this website apparently does not permit html formulae. Wait a second, it does permit formulae, but only LaTeX. I know LaTeX, but the formulae aren’t in that format right now. I should maybe convert them.
You won’t understand the flowchart if you don’t want to discuss metaphysics. I don’t think I can prove that something, of which you don’t know what it is, could be useful to you. You would have to know what it is and judge for yourself. If you don’t want to know, it’s ok.
I am currently not sure why you would want to discuss this thing at all, given that you do not seem quite interested of the formalisms, but you do not seem interested of metaphysics either. You seem to expect me to explain this stuff to you in terms of something that is familiar to you, yet you don’t seem very interested to have a discussion where I would actually do that. If you don’t know why you are having this discussion, maybe you would like to do something else?
There are quite probably others in LessWrong who would be interested of this, because there has been prior discussion of CTMU. People interested in fringe theories, unfortunately, are not always the brightest of the lot, and I respect your abilities to casually namedrop a bunch of things I will probably spend days thinking about.
But I don’t know why you wrote so much about billions of years, babies, human cultural evolution, 100 megabytes and such. I am troubled by the thought that you might think I’m some loony hippie who actually needs a recap on those things. I am not yet feeling very comfortable in this forum because I perceive myself as vulnerable to being misrepresented as some sort of a fool by people who don’t understand what I’m doing.
I’m not trying to change LessWrong. But if this forum has people criticizing the CTMU without having a clue of what it is, then I attain a certain feeling of entitlement. You can’t just go badmouthing people and their theories and not expect any consequences if you are mistaken. You don’t need to defend yourself either, because I’m here to tell you what recursive metaphysical theories such as the CTMU are about, or recommend you to shut up about the CTMU if you are not interested of metaphysics. I’m not here to bloat my ego by portraying other people as fools with witty rhetoric, and if you Google about the CTMU, you’ll find a lot of people doing precisely that to the CTMU, and you will understand why I fear that I, too, could be treated in such a way.
I’m mostly writing this stuff trying to explain what my mindset, which I guess to be somewhat coincident with the general LW one, is like, and where it seems to run into problems with trying to understand these theories. My question about the assumptions is basically poking at something like “what’s the informal explanation of why this is a good way to approach figuring out reality”, which isn’t really an easy thing to answer. I’m mostly writing about my own viewpoint instead of addressing the metaphysical theory, since it’s easy to write about stuff I already understand, and a lot harder to to try to understand something coming from a different tradition and make meaningful comments about it. Sorry if this feels like dismissing your stuff.
The reason I went on about the complexity of the DNA and the brain is that this is stuff that wasn’t really known before the mid-20th century. Most of modern philosophy was being done when people had some idea that the process of life is essentially mechanical and not magical, but no real idea on just how complex the mechanism is. People could still get away with assuming that intelligent thought is not that formally complex around the time of Russell and Wittgenstein, until it started dawning just what a massive hairball of a mess human intelligence working in the real world is after the 1950s. Still, most philosophy seems to be following the same mode of investigation as Wittgenstein or Kant did, despite the sudden unfortunate appearance of a bookshelf full of volumes written by insane aliens between the realm of human thought and basic logic discovered by molecular biologists and cognitive scientists.
I’m not expecting people to rewrite the 100 000 pages of complexity into human mathematics, but I’m always aware that it needs to be dealt with somehow. For one thing, it’s a reason to pay more attention to empiricism than philosophy has traditionally done. As in, actually do empirical stuff, not just go “ah, yes, empiricism is indeed a thing, it goes in that slot in the theory”. You can’t understand raw DNA much, but you can poke people with sticks, see what they do, and get some clues on what’s going on with them.
For another thing, being aware of the evolutionary history of humans and the current physical constraints of human cognition and DNA can guide making an actual theory of mind from the ground up. The kludged up and sorta-working naturally evolved version might be equal to 100 000 pages of math, which is quite a lot, but also tells us that we should be able to get where we want without having to write 1 000 000 000 pages of math. A straight-up mysterian could just go, yeah, the human intelligence might be infinitely complex and you’ll never come up with the formal theory. Before we knew about DNA, we would have had a harder time coming up with a counterargument.
I keep going on about the basic science stuff, since I have the feeling that the LW style of approaching things basically starts from mid-20th century computer science and natural science, not from the philosophical tradition going back to antiquity, and there’s some sort of slight mutual incomprehension between it and modern traditional philosophy. It’s a bit like C.P. Snow’s Two Cultures thing. Many philosophers seem to be from Culture One, while LW is people from Culture Two trying to set up a philosophy of their own. Some key posts about LW’s problems with philosophy are probably Against Modal Logics and
A Diseased Discipline. Also there’s the book Good and Real, which is philosophy being done by a computer scientist and which LW folk seem to find approachable.
The key ideas in the LW approach are that you’re running on top of a massive hairball of junky evolved cognitive machinery that will trip you up at any chance you get, so you’ll need to practice empirical science to figure out what’s actually going on with life, plain old thinking hard won’t help since that’ll just lead to your broken head machinery tripping you up again, and that the end result of what you’re trying to do should be a computable algorithm. Neither of these things show up in traditional philosophy, since traditional philosophy got started before there was computer science or cognitive science or molecular biology. So LessWrongers will be confused about non-empirical attempts to get to the bottom of real-world stuff and they will be confused if the get to the bottom attempt doesn’t look like it will end up being an algorithm.
I’m not saying this approach is better. Philosophers obviously spend a long time working through their stuff, and what I am doing here is basically just picking low-hanging fruits from science that’s so recent that it hasn’t percolated into the cultural background thought yet. But we are living in interesting times when philosophers can stay mulling through the conceptual analysis, and then all of a sudden scientists will barge in and go, hey, we were doing some empiric stuff with machines, and it turns out conterfactual worlds are actually sort of real.
You don’t have to apologize, because you have been useful already. I don’t require you to go out of your way to analyze this stuff, but of course it would also be nice if we could understand each other.
The reason I went on about the complexity of the DNA and the brain is that this is stuff that wasn’t really known before the mid-20th century. Most of modern philosophy was being done when people had some idea that the process of life is essentially mechanical and not magical, but no real idea on just how complex the mechanism is. People could still get away with assuming that intelligent thought is not that formally complex around the time of Russell and Wittgenstein, until it started dawning just what a massive hairball of a mess human intelligence working in the real world is after the 1950s. Still, most philosophy seems to be following the same mode of investigation as Wittgenstein or Kant did, despite the sudden unfortunate appearance of a bookshelf full of volumes written by insane aliens between the realm of human thought and basic logic discovered by molecular biologists and cognitive scientists.
That’s a good point. The philosophical tradition of discussion I belong to was started in 1974 as a radical deviation from contemporary philosophy, which makes it pretty fresh. My personal opinion is that within decades of centuries, the largely obsolete mode of investigation you referred to will be mostly replaced by something that resembles what I and a few others are currently doing. This is because the old mode of investigation does not produce results. Despite intense scrutiny for 300 years, it has not provided an answer to such a simple philosophical problem as the problem of induction. Instead, it has corrupted the very writing style of philosophers. When one is reading philosophical publications by authors with academic prestige, every other sentence seems somehow defensive, and the writer seems to be squirming in the inconvenience caused by his intuitive understanding that what he’s doing is barren but he doesn’t know of a better option. It’s very hard for a distinguished academic to go into the freaky realm and find out whether someone made sense but had a very different approach than the academic approach. Aloof but industrious young people, with lots of ability but little prestige, are more suitable for that.
Nowadays the relatively simple philosophical problem of induction (proof of the Poincare conjecture is relatiely extremely complex) has been portrayed as such a difficult problem, that if someone devises a theoretic framework which facilitates a relatively simple solution to the problem, academic people are very inclined to state that they don’t understand the solution. I believe this is because they insist the solution should be something produced by several authors working together for a century. Something that will make theoretical philosophy again appear glamorous. It’s not that glamorous, and I don’t think it was very glamorous to invent 0 either—whoever did that—but it was pretty important.
I’m not sure what good this ranting of mine is supposed to do, though.
I’m not expecting people to rewrite the 100 000 pages of complexity into human mathematics, but I’m always aware that it needs to be dealt with somehow. For one thing, it’s a reason to pay more attention to empiricism than philosophy has traditionally done. As in, actually do empirical stuff, not just go “ah, yes, empiricism is indeed a thing, it goes in that slot in the theory”. You can’t understand raw DNA much, but you can poke people with sticks, see what they do, and get some clues on what’s going on with them.
The metaphysics of quality, of which my RP is a much-altered instance, is an empiricist theory, written by someone who has taught creative writing in Uni, but who has also worked writing technical documents. The author has a pretty good understanding of evolution, social matters, computers, stuff like that. Formal logic is the only thing in which he does not seem proficient, which maybe explains why it took so long for me to analyze his theories. :)
If you want, you can buy his first book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance from Amazon at the price of a pint of beer. (Tap me in the shoulder if this is considered inappropriate advertising.) You seem to be logically rather demanding, which is good. It means I should tell you that in order to attain understanding of MOQ that explains a lot more of the metaphysical side of RP, you should also read his second book. They are also available in every Finnish public library I have checked (maybe three or four libraries).
What more to say… Pirsig is extremely critical of the philosophical tradition starting from antiquity. I already know LW does not think highly of contemporary philosophy, and that’s why I thought we might have something in common in the first place. I think we belong to the same world, because I’m pretty sure I don’t belong to Culture One.
The key ideas in the LW approach are that you’re running on top of a massive hairball of junky evolved cognitive machinery that will trip you up at any chance you get
Okay, but nobody truly understands that hairball, if it’s the brain.
the end result of what you’re trying to do should be a computable algorithm.
That’s what I’m trying to do! But it is not my only goal. I’m also trying to have at least some discourse with World One, because I want to finish a thing I began. My friend is currently in the process of writing a formal definition related to that thing, and I won’t get far with the algorithm approach before he’s finished that and is available for something else. But we are actually planning that. I’m not bullshitting you or anything. We have been planning to do that for some time already. And it won’t be fancy at first, but I suppose it could get better and better the more we work on it, or the approach would maybe prove a failure, but that, again, would be an interesting result. Our approach is maybe not easily understood, though...
My friend understands philosophy pretty well, but he’s not extremely interested of it. I have this abstract model of how this algortihm thing should be done, but I can’t prove to anyone that it’s correct. Not right now. It’s just something I have developed by analyzing an unusual metaphysical theory for years. The reason my friend wants to do this apparently is that my enthusiasm is contagious and he does enjoy maths for the sake of maths itself. But I don’t think I can convince people to do this with me on grounds that it would be useful! And some time ago, people thought number theory is a completely useless but a somehow “beautiful” form of mathematics. Now the products of number theory are used in top-secret military encryption, but the point is, nobody who originally developed number theory could have convinced anyone the theory would have such use in the future. So, I don’t think I can have people working with me in hopes of attaining grand personal success. But I think I could meet someone who finds this kind of activity very enjoyable.
The “state basic assumptions” approach is not good in the sense that it would go all the way to explaining RP. It’s maybe a good starter, but I can’t really transform RP into something that could be understood from an O point of view. That would be like me needing to express equation x + 7 = 20 to you in such terms that x + y = 20. You couldn’t make any sense of that.
I really have to go now, actually I’m already late from somewhere...
A theory of mind that can actually do the work needs to build up the same sort of kernel evolution and culture have set up for people. For the human ballpark estimate, you’d have to fill something like 100 000 pages with math, all setting up the basic machinery you need for the mind to get going. A very abstracted out theory of mind could no doubt cut off an order of magnitude or two out of that, but something like Maxwell’s equations on a single sheet of paper won’t do. It isn’t answering the question of how you’d tell a computer how to be a mind, and that’s the question I keep looking at this stuff with.
You want a sweater. I give you a baby sheep, and it is the only baby sheep you have ever seen that is not completely lame or retarded. You need wool to produce the sweater, so why are you disappointed? Look, the mathematical part of the theory is something we wrote less than a week ago, and it is already better than any theory of this type I have ever heard of (three or four). The point is not that this would be excruciatingly difficult. The point is that for some reason, almost nobody is doing this. It probably has something to do with the severe stagnation in the field of philosophy. The people who could develop philosophy find the academic discipline so revolting they don’t.
I did not come to LessWrong to tell everyone I have solved the secrets of the universe, or that I am very smart. My ineptitude in math is the greatest single obstacle in my attempts to continue development. If I didn’t know exactly one person who is good at math and wants to do this kind of work with me, I might be in an insane asylum, but no more about that. I came here because this is my life… and even though I greatly value the MOQ community, everyone on those mailing lists is apparently even less proficient in maths and logic as I am. Maybe someone here thinks this is fun and wants to have a fun creative process with me.
I would like to write a few of those 100 000 pages that we need. I don’t get your point. You seem to require me to have written them before I have written them.
My confusion about the assumptions is basically that I get the sense that analytic philosophers seem to operate like they could just write the name of some complex human concept, like “morality”, then throw in some math notation like modal logic, quantified formulas and set memberships, and call it a day. But what I’m expecting is something that teaches me how to program a computer to do mind-stuff, and a computer won’t have the corresponding mental concept for the word “morality” like a human has, since the human has the ~200M special sauce kernel which gives them that. And I hardly ever see philosophers talking about this bit.
Do you expect to build the digital sauce kernel without any kind of a plan—not even a tentative one? If not, a few pages of extremely abstract formulae is all I have now, and frankly, I’m not happy about that either. I can’t teach you nearly anything you seem interested of, but I could really use some discussion with interested people. And you have already been helpful. You don’t need to consider me someone who is aggressively imposing his views on individual people. I would love to find people who are interested of these things because there are so few of them.
I had a hard time figuring out what you mean by basic assumptions, because I’ve been doing this for such a long time I tend to forget what kind of metaphysical assumptions are generally held by people who like science but are disinterested of metaphysics. I think I’ve now caught up with you. Here are some basic assumptions.
RP is about definable things. It is not supposed to make statements about undefinable things—not even that they don’t exist, like you would seem to believe.
Humans are before anthropology in RP. The former is in O2 and the latter in O4. I didn’t know how to tell you that because I didn’t know you wanted to hear that and not some other part of the theory in order to not go whaaa. I’d need to tell you everything but that would involve a lot of metaphysics. But the theory is not a theory of the history of the world, if “world” is something that begins with the Big Bang.
From your empirical scientific point of view, I suppose it would be correct to state that RP is a theory of how the self-conscious part of one person evolves during his lifetime.
At least in the current simple isntance of RP, you don’t need to know anything about the metaphysical content to understand the math. You don’t need to go out of math-mode, because there are no nonstandard metaphysical concepts among the formulae.
If you do go out of the math mode and want to know what the symbols stand foor, I think that’s very good. But this can only be explained to you in terms of metaphysics, because empirical science simply does not account for everything you experience. Suppose you stop by in the grocery store. Where’s the empirical theory that accounts for that? Maybe some general sociological theory would. But my point is, no such empirical theory is actually implemented. You don’t acquire a scientific explanation for the things you did in the store. Still you remember them. You experienced them. They exist in your self-conscious mind in some way, which is not dependent of your conceptions of what is the relationship between topology and model theory, or of your understanding of why fission of iron does not produce energy, or how one investor could single-handedly significantly affect whether a country joins the Euro. From your personal, what you might perhaps call “subjective”, point of view, it does not even depend on your conception of cognition science, unless you actually apply that knowledge to it. You probably don’t do that all the time although you do that sometimes.
I don’t subscribe to any kind of “subjectivism”, whatever that might be in this context, or idealism, in the sense that something like that would be “true” in a meaningful way. But you might agree that when trying to develop the theory underlying self-conscious phenomenal and abstract experience, you can’t begin from the Big Bang, because you weren’t there.
You could use RP to describe a world you experience in a dream, and the explanation would work as well as when you are awake. Physical theories don’t work in that world. For example, if you look at your watch in a dream, then look away, and look at it again, the watch may display a completely different time. Or the watch may function, but when you take it apart, you find that instead of clockwork, it contains something a functioning mechanical watch will not contain, such as coins.
RP is intended to relate abstract thought (O, N, S) to sensory perceptions, emotions and actions (R), but to define all relations between abstract entities to other abstract entities recursively.
One difference between RP and the empiric theories of cosmology and such, that you mentioned, is that the latter will not describe the ability of person X to conceptualize his own cognitive processess in a way that can actually be used right now to describe what, or rather, how, some person is thinking with respect to abstract concepts. RP does that.
RP can be used to estimate the metaphysical composure of other people. You seem to place most of the questions you label “metaphysical” or “philosophical” in O.
I don’t yet know if this forum tolerates much metaphysical discussion, but my theory is based on about six years of work on the Metaphysics of Quality. That is not mainstream philosophy and I don’t know how people here will perceive it. I have altered the MOQ a lot. It’s latest “authorized” variant in 1991 decisively included mostly just the O patterns. Analyzing the theory was very difficult for me in general. But maybe I will confuse people if I say nothing about the metaphysical side. So I’ll think what to say...
RP is not an instance of relativism (except in the Buddhist sense), absolutism, determinism, indeterminism, realism, antirealism or solipsism. Also, I consider all those theories to be some kind figures of speech, because I can’t find any use for them except to illustrate a certain point in a certain discussion in a metaphorical fashion. In logical analysis, these concepts do not necessarily retain the same meaning when they are used again in another discussion. These concepts acquire definable meaning only when detached from the philosophical use and being placed within a specific context.
Structurally RP resembles what I believe computer scientists call context-free languages, or programming languages with dynamic typing. I am not yet sure what is the exact definition of the former, but having written a few programs, I do understand what it means to do typing run-time. The Western mainstream philosophical tradition does not seem to include any theories that would be analogues of these computer science topics.
I have read GEB but don’t remember much. I’ll recap what a quine is. I tend to need to discuss mathematical things with someone face to face before I understand them, which slows down progress.
The cat/line thing is not very relevant, but apparently I didn’t remember the experiment right. However, if the person and the robot could not see the lines at the same time for some reason—such as the robot needing to operate the scanner and thus not seeing inside the scanner—the robot could alter the person’s brain to produce a very strong response to parallel lines in order to verify that the screen inside the scanner, which displays the lines, does not malfunction, is not unplugged, the person is not blind, etc. There could be more efficient ways of finding such things out, but if the robot has replaceable hardware and can thus live indefinitely, it has all the time in the world...
About the classification thing: Agree that it’s very important that a general AI be able to classify entities into “dumb machines” and things complex enough to be self-aware, warrant an intentional stance and require ethical consideration. Even putting aside the ethical concerns, being able to recognize complex agents with intentions and model their intentions instead of their most likely massively complex physical machinery is probably vital to any sort of meaningful ability to act in a social domain with many other complex agents (cf. Dennett’s intentional stance)
I understood the existing image reconstruction experiments measure the activation on the visual cortex when the subject is actually viewing an image, which does indeed get you a straightforward mapping to a bitmap. This isn’t the same as thinking about a cat, a person could be thinking about a cat while not looking at one, and they could have a cat in their visual field while daydreaming or suffering from hysterical blindness, so that they weren’t thinking about a cat despite having a cat image correctly show up in their visual cortex scan.
I don’t actually know what the neural correlate of thinking about a cat, as opposed to having one’s visual cortex activated by looking at one, would be like, but I was assuming interpreting it would require much more sophisticated understanding of the brain, basically at the level of difficult of telling whether a brain scan correlates with thinking about freedom, a theory of gravity or reciprocality. Basically something that’s entirely beyond current neuroscience and more indicative of some sort of Laplace’s demon like thought experiment where you can actually observe and understand the whole mechanical ensemble of the brain.
Quines are maps that contain themselves. A quining system could reflect on its entire static structure, though it would have to run some sort of emulation slower than its physical substrate to predict its future states. Hofstadter’s GEB links quines to reflection in AI.
“There aren’t any assumptions” is just a plain non-starter. There’s the natural language we’re using that’s used to present the theory and ground the concepts in the theory, and natural language basically carries a billion years of evolution leading to the three billion base pair human genome loaded with accidental complexity, leading to something from ten to a hundred thousand years of human cultural evolution with even more accidental complexity that probably gets us something in the ballpark of 100 megabytes irreducible complexity from the human DNA that you need to build up a newborn brain and another 100 megabytes (going by the heuristic of one bit of permanently learned knowledge per one second) for the kernel of the cultural stuff a human needs to learn from their perceptions to be able to competently deal with concepts like “income tax” or “calculus”. You get both of those for free when talking with other people, and neither when trying to build an AGI-grade theory of the mind.
This is also why I spelled out the trivial basic assumptions I’m working from (and probably did a very poor job at actually conveying the whole idea complex). When you start doing set theory, I assume we’re dealing with things at the complexity of mathematical objects. Then you throw in something like “anthropology” as an element in a set, and I, still in math mode, start going, whaa, you need humans before you have anthropology, and you need the billion years of evolution leading to the accidental complexity in humans to have humans, and you need physics to have the humans live and run the societies for anthropology to study, and you need the rest of the biosphere for the humans to not just curl up and die in the featureless vacuum and, and.. and that’s a lot of math. While the actual system with the power sets looks just like uniform, featureless soup to me. Sure, there are all the labels, which make my brain do the above i-don’t-get-it dance, but the thing I’m actually looking for is the mathematical structure. And that’s just really simple, nowhere near what you’d need to model a loose cloud of hydrogen floating in empty space, not to mention something many orders of magnitude more complex like a society of human beings.
My confusion about the assumptions is basically that I get the sense that analytic philosophers seem to operate like they could just write the name of some complex human concept, like “morality”, then throw in some math notation like modal logic, quantified formulas and set memberships, and call it a day. But what I’m expecting is something that teaches me how to program a computer to do mind-stuff, and a computer won’t have the corresponding mental concept for the word “morality” like a human has, since the human has the ~200M special sauce kernel which gives them that. And I hardly ever see philosophers talking about this bit.
A theory of mind that can actually do the work needs to build up the same sort of kernel evolution and culture have set up for people. For the human ballpark estimate, you’d have to fill something like 100 000 pages with math, all setting up the basic machinery you need for the mind to get going. A very abstracted out theory of mind could no doubt cut off an order of magnitude or two out of that, but something like Maxwell’s equations on a single sheet of paper won’t do. It isn’t answering the question of how you’d tell a computer how to be a mind, and that’s the question I keep looking at this stuff with.
There are many ways to answer that question. I have a flowchart and formulae. The opposite of that would be something to the effect of having the source code. I’m not sure why you expect me to have that. Was it something I said?
I thought I’ve given you links to my actual work, but I can’t find them. Did I forget? Hmm...
The Metaphysical Origin of RP
Set Theoretic Explanation of the Main Recursion Loop
If you dislike metaphysics, only the latter is for you. I can’t paste the content, because the formatting on this website apparently does not permit html formulae. Wait a second, it does permit formulae, but only LaTeX. I know LaTeX, but the formulae aren’t in that format right now. I should maybe convert them.
You won’t understand the flowchart if you don’t want to discuss metaphysics. I don’t think I can prove that something, of which you don’t know what it is, could be useful to you. You would have to know what it is and judge for yourself. If you don’t want to know, it’s ok.
I am currently not sure why you would want to discuss this thing at all, given that you do not seem quite interested of the formalisms, but you do not seem interested of metaphysics either. You seem to expect me to explain this stuff to you in terms of something that is familiar to you, yet you don’t seem very interested to have a discussion where I would actually do that. If you don’t know why you are having this discussion, maybe you would like to do something else?
There are quite probably others in LessWrong who would be interested of this, because there has been prior discussion of CTMU. People interested in fringe theories, unfortunately, are not always the brightest of the lot, and I respect your abilities to casually namedrop a bunch of things I will probably spend days thinking about.
But I don’t know why you wrote so much about billions of years, babies, human cultural evolution, 100 megabytes and such. I am troubled by the thought that you might think I’m some loony hippie who actually needs a recap on those things. I am not yet feeling very comfortable in this forum because I perceive myself as vulnerable to being misrepresented as some sort of a fool by people who don’t understand what I’m doing.
I’m not trying to change LessWrong. But if this forum has people criticizing the CTMU without having a clue of what it is, then I attain a certain feeling of entitlement. You can’t just go badmouthing people and their theories and not expect any consequences if you are mistaken. You don’t need to defend yourself either, because I’m here to tell you what recursive metaphysical theories such as the CTMU are about, or recommend you to shut up about the CTMU if you are not interested of metaphysics. I’m not here to bloat my ego by portraying other people as fools with witty rhetoric, and if you Google about the CTMU, you’ll find a lot of people doing precisely that to the CTMU, and you will understand why I fear that I, too, could be treated in such a way.
I’m mostly writing this stuff trying to explain what my mindset, which I guess to be somewhat coincident with the general LW one, is like, and where it seems to run into problems with trying to understand these theories. My question about the assumptions is basically poking at something like “what’s the informal explanation of why this is a good way to approach figuring out reality”, which isn’t really an easy thing to answer. I’m mostly writing about my own viewpoint instead of addressing the metaphysical theory, since it’s easy to write about stuff I already understand, and a lot harder to to try to understand something coming from a different tradition and make meaningful comments about it. Sorry if this feels like dismissing your stuff.
The reason I went on about the complexity of the DNA and the brain is that this is stuff that wasn’t really known before the mid-20th century. Most of modern philosophy was being done when people had some idea that the process of life is essentially mechanical and not magical, but no real idea on just how complex the mechanism is. People could still get away with assuming that intelligent thought is not that formally complex around the time of Russell and Wittgenstein, until it started dawning just what a massive hairball of a mess human intelligence working in the real world is after the 1950s. Still, most philosophy seems to be following the same mode of investigation as Wittgenstein or Kant did, despite the sudden unfortunate appearance of a bookshelf full of volumes written by insane aliens between the realm of human thought and basic logic discovered by molecular biologists and cognitive scientists.
I’m not expecting people to rewrite the 100 000 pages of complexity into human mathematics, but I’m always aware that it needs to be dealt with somehow. For one thing, it’s a reason to pay more attention to empiricism than philosophy has traditionally done. As in, actually do empirical stuff, not just go “ah, yes, empiricism is indeed a thing, it goes in that slot in the theory”. You can’t understand raw DNA much, but you can poke people with sticks, see what they do, and get some clues on what’s going on with them.
For another thing, being aware of the evolutionary history of humans and the current physical constraints of human cognition and DNA can guide making an actual theory of mind from the ground up. The kludged up and sorta-working naturally evolved version might be equal to 100 000 pages of math, which is quite a lot, but also tells us that we should be able to get where we want without having to write 1 000 000 000 pages of math. A straight-up mysterian could just go, yeah, the human intelligence might be infinitely complex and you’ll never come up with the formal theory. Before we knew about DNA, we would have had a harder time coming up with a counterargument.
I keep going on about the basic science stuff, since I have the feeling that the LW style of approaching things basically starts from mid-20th century computer science and natural science, not from the philosophical tradition going back to antiquity, and there’s some sort of slight mutual incomprehension between it and modern traditional philosophy. It’s a bit like C.P. Snow’s Two Cultures thing. Many philosophers seem to be from Culture One, while LW is people from Culture Two trying to set up a philosophy of their own. Some key posts about LW’s problems with philosophy are probably Against Modal Logics and A Diseased Discipline. Also there’s the book Good and Real, which is philosophy being done by a computer scientist and which LW folk seem to find approachable.
The key ideas in the LW approach are that you’re running on top of a massive hairball of junky evolved cognitive machinery that will trip you up at any chance you get, so you’ll need to practice empirical science to figure out what’s actually going on with life, plain old thinking hard won’t help since that’ll just lead to your broken head machinery tripping you up again, and that the end result of what you’re trying to do should be a computable algorithm. Neither of these things show up in traditional philosophy, since traditional philosophy got started before there was computer science or cognitive science or molecular biology. So LessWrongers will be confused about non-empirical attempts to get to the bottom of real-world stuff and they will be confused if the get to the bottom attempt doesn’t look like it will end up being an algorithm.
I’m not saying this approach is better. Philosophers obviously spend a long time working through their stuff, and what I am doing here is basically just picking low-hanging fruits from science that’s so recent that it hasn’t percolated into the cultural background thought yet. But we are living in interesting times when philosophers can stay mulling through the conceptual analysis, and then all of a sudden scientists will barge in and go, hey, we were doing some empiric stuff with machines, and it turns out conterfactual worlds are actually sort of real.
You don’t have to apologize, because you have been useful already. I don’t require you to go out of your way to analyze this stuff, but of course it would also be nice if we could understand each other.
That’s a good point. The philosophical tradition of discussion I belong to was started in 1974 as a radical deviation from contemporary philosophy, which makes it pretty fresh. My personal opinion is that within decades of centuries, the largely obsolete mode of investigation you referred to will be mostly replaced by something that resembles what I and a few others are currently doing. This is because the old mode of investigation does not produce results. Despite intense scrutiny for 300 years, it has not provided an answer to such a simple philosophical problem as the problem of induction. Instead, it has corrupted the very writing style of philosophers. When one is reading philosophical publications by authors with academic prestige, every other sentence seems somehow defensive, and the writer seems to be squirming in the inconvenience caused by his intuitive understanding that what he’s doing is barren but he doesn’t know of a better option. It’s very hard for a distinguished academic to go into the freaky realm and find out whether someone made sense but had a very different approach than the academic approach. Aloof but industrious young people, with lots of ability but little prestige, are more suitable for that.
Nowadays the relatively simple philosophical problem of induction (proof of the Poincare conjecture is relatiely extremely complex) has been portrayed as such a difficult problem, that if someone devises a theoretic framework which facilitates a relatively simple solution to the problem, academic people are very inclined to state that they don’t understand the solution. I believe this is because they insist the solution should be something produced by several authors working together for a century. Something that will make theoretical philosophy again appear glamorous. It’s not that glamorous, and I don’t think it was very glamorous to invent 0 either—whoever did that—but it was pretty important.
I’m not sure what good this ranting of mine is supposed to do, though.
The metaphysics of quality, of which my RP is a much-altered instance, is an empiricist theory, written by someone who has taught creative writing in Uni, but who has also worked writing technical documents. The author has a pretty good understanding of evolution, social matters, computers, stuff like that. Formal logic is the only thing in which he does not seem proficient, which maybe explains why it took so long for me to analyze his theories. :)
If you want, you can buy his first book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance from Amazon at the price of a pint of beer. (Tap me in the shoulder if this is considered inappropriate advertising.) You seem to be logically rather demanding, which is good. It means I should tell you that in order to attain understanding of MOQ that explains a lot more of the metaphysical side of RP, you should also read his second book. They are also available in every Finnish public library I have checked (maybe three or four libraries).
What more to say… Pirsig is extremely critical of the philosophical tradition starting from antiquity. I already know LW does not think highly of contemporary philosophy, and that’s why I thought we might have something in common in the first place. I think we belong to the same world, because I’m pretty sure I don’t belong to Culture One.
Okay, but nobody truly understands that hairball, if it’s the brain.
That’s what I’m trying to do! But it is not my only goal. I’m also trying to have at least some discourse with World One, because I want to finish a thing I began. My friend is currently in the process of writing a formal definition related to that thing, and I won’t get far with the algorithm approach before he’s finished that and is available for something else. But we are actually planning that. I’m not bullshitting you or anything. We have been planning to do that for some time already. And it won’t be fancy at first, but I suppose it could get better and better the more we work on it, or the approach would maybe prove a failure, but that, again, would be an interesting result. Our approach is maybe not easily understood, though...
My friend understands philosophy pretty well, but he’s not extremely interested of it. I have this abstract model of how this algortihm thing should be done, but I can’t prove to anyone that it’s correct. Not right now. It’s just something I have developed by analyzing an unusual metaphysical theory for years. The reason my friend wants to do this apparently is that my enthusiasm is contagious and he does enjoy maths for the sake of maths itself. But I don’t think I can convince people to do this with me on grounds that it would be useful! And some time ago, people thought number theory is a completely useless but a somehow “beautiful” form of mathematics. Now the products of number theory are used in top-secret military encryption, but the point is, nobody who originally developed number theory could have convinced anyone the theory would have such use in the future. So, I don’t think I can have people working with me in hopes of attaining grand personal success. But I think I could meet someone who finds this kind of activity very enjoyable.
The “state basic assumptions” approach is not good in the sense that it would go all the way to explaining RP. It’s maybe a good starter, but I can’t really transform RP into something that could be understood from an O point of view. That would be like me needing to express equation x + 7 = 20 to you in such terms that x + y = 20. You couldn’t make any sense of that.
I really have to go now, actually I’m already late from somewhere...
I commented Against Modal Logics.
You want a sweater. I give you a baby sheep, and it is the only baby sheep you have ever seen that is not completely lame or retarded. You need wool to produce the sweater, so why are you disappointed? Look, the mathematical part of the theory is something we wrote less than a week ago, and it is already better than any theory of this type I have ever heard of (three or four). The point is not that this would be excruciatingly difficult. The point is that for some reason, almost nobody is doing this. It probably has something to do with the severe stagnation in the field of philosophy. The people who could develop philosophy find the academic discipline so revolting they don’t.
I did not come to LessWrong to tell everyone I have solved the secrets of the universe, or that I am very smart. My ineptitude in math is the greatest single obstacle in my attempts to continue development. If I didn’t know exactly one person who is good at math and wants to do this kind of work with me, I might be in an insane asylum, but no more about that. I came here because this is my life… and even though I greatly value the MOQ community, everyone on those mailing lists is apparently even less proficient in maths and logic as I am. Maybe someone here thinks this is fun and wants to have a fun creative process with me.
I would like to write a few of those 100 000 pages that we need. I don’t get your point. You seem to require me to have written them before I have written them.
Do you expect to build the digital sauce kernel without any kind of a plan—not even a tentative one? If not, a few pages of extremely abstract formulae is all I have now, and frankly, I’m not happy about that either. I can’t teach you nearly anything you seem interested of, but I could really use some discussion with interested people. And you have already been helpful. You don’t need to consider me someone who is aggressively imposing his views on individual people. I would love to find people who are interested of these things because there are so few of them.
I had a hard time figuring out what you mean by basic assumptions, because I’ve been doing this for such a long time I tend to forget what kind of metaphysical assumptions are generally held by people who like science but are disinterested of metaphysics. I think I’ve now caught up with you. Here are some basic assumptions.
RP is about definable things. It is not supposed to make statements about undefinable things—not even that they don’t exist, like you would seem to believe.
Humans are before anthropology in RP. The former is in O2 and the latter in O4. I didn’t know how to tell you that because I didn’t know you wanted to hear that and not some other part of the theory in order to not go whaaa. I’d need to tell you everything but that would involve a lot of metaphysics. But the theory is not a theory of the history of the world, if “world” is something that begins with the Big Bang.
From your empirical scientific point of view, I suppose it would be correct to state that RP is a theory of how the self-conscious part of one person evolves during his lifetime.
At least in the current simple isntance of RP, you don’t need to know anything about the metaphysical content to understand the math. You don’t need to go out of math-mode, because there are no nonstandard metaphysical concepts among the formulae.
If you do go out of the math mode and want to know what the symbols stand foor, I think that’s very good. But this can only be explained to you in terms of metaphysics, because empirical science simply does not account for everything you experience. Suppose you stop by in the grocery store. Where’s the empirical theory that accounts for that? Maybe some general sociological theory would. But my point is, no such empirical theory is actually implemented. You don’t acquire a scientific explanation for the things you did in the store. Still you remember them. You experienced them. They exist in your self-conscious mind in some way, which is not dependent of your conceptions of what is the relationship between topology and model theory, or of your understanding of why fission of iron does not produce energy, or how one investor could single-handedly significantly affect whether a country joins the Euro. From your personal, what you might perhaps call “subjective”, point of view, it does not even depend on your conception of cognition science, unless you actually apply that knowledge to it. You probably don’t do that all the time although you do that sometimes.
I don’t subscribe to any kind of “subjectivism”, whatever that might be in this context, or idealism, in the sense that something like that would be “true” in a meaningful way. But you might agree that when trying to develop the theory underlying self-conscious phenomenal and abstract experience, you can’t begin from the Big Bang, because you weren’t there.
You could use RP to describe a world you experience in a dream, and the explanation would work as well as when you are awake. Physical theories don’t work in that world. For example, if you look at your watch in a dream, then look away, and look at it again, the watch may display a completely different time. Or the watch may function, but when you take it apart, you find that instead of clockwork, it contains something a functioning mechanical watch will not contain, such as coins.
RP is intended to relate abstract thought (O, N, S) to sensory perceptions, emotions and actions (R), but to define all relations between abstract entities to other abstract entities recursively.
One difference between RP and the empiric theories of cosmology and such, that you mentioned, is that the latter will not describe the ability of person X to conceptualize his own cognitive processess in a way that can actually be used right now to describe what, or rather, how, some person is thinking with respect to abstract concepts. RP does that.
RP can be used to estimate the metaphysical composure of other people. You seem to place most of the questions you label “metaphysical” or “philosophical” in O.
I don’t yet know if this forum tolerates much metaphysical discussion, but my theory is based on about six years of work on the Metaphysics of Quality. That is not mainstream philosophy and I don’t know how people here will perceive it. I have altered the MOQ a lot. It’s latest “authorized” variant in 1991 decisively included mostly just the O patterns. Analyzing the theory was very difficult for me in general. But maybe I will confuse people if I say nothing about the metaphysical side. So I’ll think what to say...
RP is not an instance of relativism (except in the Buddhist sense), absolutism, determinism, indeterminism, realism, antirealism or solipsism. Also, I consider all those theories to be some kind figures of speech, because I can’t find any use for them except to illustrate a certain point in a certain discussion in a metaphorical fashion. In logical analysis, these concepts do not necessarily retain the same meaning when they are used again in another discussion. These concepts acquire definable meaning only when detached from the philosophical use and being placed within a specific context.
Structurally RP resembles what I believe computer scientists call context-free languages, or programming languages with dynamic typing. I am not yet sure what is the exact definition of the former, but having written a few programs, I do understand what it means to do typing run-time. The Western mainstream philosophical tradition does not seem to include any theories that would be analogues of these computer science topics.
I have read GEB but don’t remember much. I’ll recap what a quine is. I tend to need to discuss mathematical things with someone face to face before I understand them, which slows down progress.
The cat/line thing is not very relevant, but apparently I didn’t remember the experiment right. However, if the person and the robot could not see the lines at the same time for some reason—such as the robot needing to operate the scanner and thus not seeing inside the scanner—the robot could alter the person’s brain to produce a very strong response to parallel lines in order to verify that the screen inside the scanner, which displays the lines, does not malfunction, is not unplugged, the person is not blind, etc. There could be more efficient ways of finding such things out, but if the robot has replaceable hardware and can thus live indefinitely, it has all the time in the world...