Thanks for writing this. Appreciate your engagement with potential sources of errors. Since you submitted this for the contest, I’ll hold off on a substantive reply at this time, but I would like to press on one point I’d love to see you explore further. You say:
That being said, what we know is indeed contingent on the things to which we directed our efforts to make our world model more fine-grained. But it doesn’t mean, as the author states in the Thesis, that “the truth that can be known is not independent of us, but rather dependent on that for which we care.”
My reading is that you meant for this to be an argument against the thesis, but as I read it, it’s not really making such an argument, just stating that a statement of your own doesn’t support the one I made in the book. I’d be very interested to see your full argument against this part of the thesis, assuming I’m correct that you disagree with it. I can’t promise I’ll agree with whatever argument you’d make, but I’d be very much interested to see the argument!
Thank you for the reply! Suppose that the world model has facts A and B which are so far away that a human can learn only one but not the other (e.g. if an agent can explore either the left part of the tree or the right part, but not both since the agent lacks the resources). Then the agent’s choices would determine whether the agent will learn fact A or fact B. Does it means that “the truth that can be known” before the agent started exploring the treedoesn’t contain both facts?
I’m not sure how to answer your question, because it’s not clear to me who’s world model you’re saying has facts A and B. In seems in the setup there’s some agent X who you propose can learn either A or B but not both, but these must not be initially in X’s world model else X would already know both.
Thanks for writing this. Appreciate your engagement with potential sources of errors. Since you submitted this for the contest, I’ll hold off on a substantive reply at this time, but I would like to press on one point I’d love to see you explore further. You say:
My reading is that you meant for this to be an argument against the thesis, but as I read it, it’s not really making such an argument, just stating that a statement of your own doesn’t support the one I made in the book. I’d be very interested to see your full argument against this part of the thesis, assuming I’m correct that you disagree with it. I can’t promise I’ll agree with whatever argument you’d make, but I’d be very much interested to see the argument!
Thank you for the reply! Suppose that the world model has facts A and B which are so far away that a human can learn only one but not the other (e.g. if an agent can explore either the left part of the tree or the right part, but not both since the agent lacks the resources). Then the agent’s choices would determine whether the agent will learn fact A or fact B. Does it means that “the truth that can be known” before the agent started exploring the tree doesn’t contain both facts?
UPD: I meant the world, not the world model.
I’m not sure how to answer your question, because it’s not clear to me who’s world model you’re saying has facts A and B. In seems in the setup there’s some agent X who you propose can learn either A or B but not both, but these must not be initially in X’s world model else X would already know both.