Why should we expect that True Names useful for research exist in general? It seems like there are reasons why they don’t:
messy and non-robust maps between any clean concept and what we actually care about, such that more of the difficulty in research is in figuring out the map. The Standard Model of physics describes all the important physics behind protein folding, but we actually needed to invent AlphaFold.
The True Name doesn’t quite represent what we care about. Tiling agents is a True Name for agents building successors, but we don’t care that agents can rigorously prove things about their successors.
question is fundamentally ill-posed: what’s the True Name of a crab? what’s the True Name of a ghost?
Most of these examples are bad, but hopefully they get the point across.
It’s pretty hard to argue for things that don’t exist yet, but here’s a few intuitions for why I think agency related concepts will beget True Names:
I think basically every concept looks messy before it’s not, and I think this is particularly true at the very beginning of fields. Like, a bunch of Newton’s early journaling on optics is mostly listing a bunch of facts that he’s noticed—it’s clear with hindsight which ones are relevant and which aren’t, but before we have a theory it can just look like a messy pile of observations from the outside. Perusing old science, from before theory or paradigm, gives me a similar impression for e.g., “heat,” “motion,” and “speciation.”
Many scientists have, throughout history, proclaimed that science is done. Bacon was already pretty riled up about this in the late 1500s when he complained that for thousands of years everyone had been content enough with Aristotle that they hadn’t produced practically any new knowledge. Then he attempted to start the foundation of science, with the goal of finding True Names, which was pretty successful. In the 1800s people were saying it again—that all that was left was to calculate out what we already knew from physics—but of course then Einstein came and changed how we fundamentally conceived of it.
The Standard Model of physics also describes motion and speciation, but that doesn’t mean that the way to understand motion and speciation, nor their True Names, lies in clarifying how they relate to the Standard Model.
I think that most of the work in figuring out True Names is in first identifying them, which is the part of the work that looks more like philosophy. E.g., I expect the True Name of a “crab” is ill-posed, but that something like “how crab-like-things use abstractions to achieve their goals” is a more likely candidate for a True Name(s).
The inside view reason I expect True Names for agency is hard to articulate, as part of it is a somewhat illegible sense that there are deep principles to the world, and agents make up part of our world. But I also think that, historically, when people have stared long enough at pieces of the world that permit of regularities, they are usually eventually successful (and that’s true even if the particular system itself isn’t regular, such as “chaos” and “randomness,” because you can still find them at a meta level, as with ideas like k-complexity). I don’t see that much reason to suspect that something different is happening with agents. I think it’s a harder problem than other scientific problems have been, but I still expect that it’s solvable.
Why should we expect that True Names useful for research exist in general? It seems like there are reasons why they don’t:
messy and non-robust maps between any clean concept and what we actually care about, such that more of the difficulty in research is in figuring out the map. The Standard Model of physics describes all the important physics behind protein folding, but we actually needed to invent AlphaFold.
The True Name doesn’t quite represent what we care about. Tiling agents is a True Name for agents building successors, but we don’t care that agents can rigorously prove things about their successors.
question is fundamentally ill-posed: what’s the True Name of a crab? what’s the True Name of a ghost?
Most of these examples are bad, but hopefully they get the point across.
It’s pretty hard to argue for things that don’t exist yet, but here’s a few intuitions for why I think agency related concepts will beget True Names:
I think basically every concept looks messy before it’s not, and I think this is particularly true at the very beginning of fields. Like, a bunch of Newton’s early journaling on optics is mostly listing a bunch of facts that he’s noticed—it’s clear with hindsight which ones are relevant and which aren’t, but before we have a theory it can just look like a messy pile of observations from the outside. Perusing old science, from before theory or paradigm, gives me a similar impression for e.g., “heat,” “motion,” and “speciation.”
Many scientists have, throughout history, proclaimed that science is done. Bacon was already pretty riled up about this in the late 1500s when he complained that for thousands of years everyone had been content enough with Aristotle that they hadn’t produced practically any new knowledge. Then he attempted to start the foundation of science, with the goal of finding True Names, which was pretty successful. In the 1800s people were saying it again—that all that was left was to calculate out what we already knew from physics—but of course then Einstein came and changed how we fundamentally conceived of it.
The Standard Model of physics also describes motion and speciation, but that doesn’t mean that the way to understand motion and speciation, nor their True Names, lies in clarifying how they relate to the Standard Model.
I think that most of the work in figuring out True Names is in first identifying them, which is the part of the work that looks more like philosophy. E.g., I expect the True Name of a “crab” is ill-posed, but that something like “how crab-like-things use abstractions to achieve their goals” is a more likely candidate for a True Name(s).
The inside view reason I expect True Names for agency is hard to articulate, as part of it is a somewhat illegible sense that there are deep principles to the world, and agents make up part of our world. But I also think that, historically, when people have stared long enough at pieces of the world that permit of regularities, they are usually eventually successful (and that’s true even if the particular system itself isn’t regular, such as “chaos” and “randomness,” because you can still find them at a meta level, as with ideas like k-complexity). I don’t see that much reason to suspect that something different is happening with agents. I think it’s a harder problem than other scientific problems have been, but I still expect that it’s solvable.