All of my philosophy here actually comes from trying to figure out how to build a self-modifying AI that applies its own reasoning principles to itself in the process of rewriting its own source code.
So it’s not that being suspicious of Occam’s Razor, but using your current mind and intelligence to inspect it, shows that you’re being fair and defensible by questioning your foundational beliefs.
Eliezer, let’s step back a moment and look at your approach to AI research. It looks to me like you are trying to first clarify your philosophy, and then you hope that the algorithms will follow from the philosophy. I have a PhD in philosophy and I’ve been doing AI research for many years. For me, it’s a two-way street. My philosophy guides my AI research and my experiments with AI feed back into my philosophy.
I started my AI research with the belief that Occam’s Razor is right. In a sense, I still believe it is right. But trying to implement Occam’s Razor in code has changed my philosophy. The problem is taking the informal, intuitive, vague, contradictory concept of Occam’s Razor that is in my mind and converting it into an algorithm that works in a computer. There are many different formalizations of Occam’s Razor, and they don’t all agree with each other. I now think that none of them are quite right.
I agree that introspection suggests that we use something like Occam’s Razor when we think, and I agree that it is likely that evolution has shaped our minds so that our intuitive concept of Occam’s Razor captures something about how the universe is structured. What I doubt is that any of our formalizations of Occam’s Razor are correct. This is why I insist that any formalizations of Occam’s Razor require experimental validation.
I am not “being suspicious of Occam’s Razor” in order to be “fair and defensible by questioning [my] foundational beliefs”. I am suspicious of formalizations of Occam’s Razor because I doubt that they really capture how our minds work, so I would like to see evidence that these formalizations work. I am suspicious of informal thinking about Occam’s Razor, because I have learned that introspection is misleading, and because my informal notion of Occam’s Razor becomes fuzzier and fuzzier the longer I stare at it.
All of my philosophy here actually comes from trying to figure out how to build a self-modifying AI that applies its own reasoning principles to itself in the process of rewriting its own source code.
So it’s not that being suspicious of Occam’s Razor, but using your current mind and intelligence to inspect it, shows that you’re being fair and defensible by questioning your foundational beliefs.
Eliezer, let’s step back a moment and look at your approach to AI research. It looks to me like you are trying to first clarify your philosophy, and then you hope that the algorithms will follow from the philosophy. I have a PhD in philosophy and I’ve been doing AI research for many years. For me, it’s a two-way street. My philosophy guides my AI research and my experiments with AI feed back into my philosophy.
I started my AI research with the belief that Occam’s Razor is right. In a sense, I still believe it is right. But trying to implement Occam’s Razor in code has changed my philosophy. The problem is taking the informal, intuitive, vague, contradictory concept of Occam’s Razor that is in my mind and converting it into an algorithm that works in a computer. There are many different formalizations of Occam’s Razor, and they don’t all agree with each other. I now think that none of them are quite right.
I agree that introspection suggests that we use something like Occam’s Razor when we think, and I agree that it is likely that evolution has shaped our minds so that our intuitive concept of Occam’s Razor captures something about how the universe is structured. What I doubt is that any of our formalizations of Occam’s Razor are correct. This is why I insist that any formalizations of Occam’s Razor require experimental validation.
I am not “being suspicious of Occam’s Razor” in order to be “fair and defensible by questioning [my] foundational beliefs”. I am suspicious of formalizations of Occam’s Razor because I doubt that they really capture how our minds work, so I would like to see evidence that these formalizations work. I am suspicious of informal thinking about Occam’s Razor, because I have learned that introspection is misleading, and because my informal notion of Occam’s Razor becomes fuzzier and fuzzier the longer I stare at it.