Eliezer_Yudkowsky: To condense, you’re saying that between the time the mind knows nothing (in a human’s case, conception) to the time when it has knowledge of the world, it must have performed Bayesian inference (I’m trying to be more specfic than your frequent “Bayesian-like processes”), because there is only a tiny probability of the mind’s belief matching the world without doing so, similar to that of the probability of an egg unscrambling itself, water spontaneously giving you work, etc.
Now, I either have a counterexample, or misunderstand the generality of your claim. Evolutions would tend to give humans brains with beliefs that largely matched the world, else they would be weeded out. So, after conception, as the mind grows, it would build itself up (as per its genetic code, proteome, bacteria, etc.) with beliefs that match the world, even if it didn’t perform any Bayesian inferences.
So, is this a genuine counterexample, or would you say that the evolutionary history functioned as a sort of mind that “encountered evidence” (organisms with poor beliefs dying out), which then built up a database of information about the world that it would then inject into new organisms?
Eliezer_Yudkowsky: To condense, you’re saying that between the time the mind knows nothing (in a human’s case, conception) to the time when it has knowledge of the world, it must have performed Bayesian inference (I’m trying to be more specfic than your frequent “Bayesian-like processes”), because there is only a tiny probability of the mind’s belief matching the world without doing so, similar to that of the probability of an egg unscrambling itself, water spontaneously giving you work, etc.
Now, I either have a counterexample, or misunderstand the generality of your claim. Evolutions would tend to give humans brains with beliefs that largely matched the world, else they would be weeded out. So, after conception, as the mind grows, it would build itself up (as per its genetic code, proteome, bacteria, etc.) with beliefs that match the world, even if it didn’t perform any Bayesian inferences.
So, is this a genuine counterexample, or would you say that the evolutionary history functioned as a sort of mind that “encountered evidence” (organisms with poor beliefs dying out), which then built up a database of information about the world that it would then inject into new organisms?
Or did I miss your point somehow?
Good question. Pity it was never answered.