The stimulation of his sensory receptors is all the evidence anybody has had to go on, ultimately, in arriving at his picture of the world.
Isn’t this missing our evolutionary prior, our instinct? And what argument can be made against privileged philosophical insight? That the map is not the territory is only partly true as the map is part of the territory and everyone can explore and alter their map and therefore alter the territory. That is what is happening when philosophers and mathematicians explore the abstract landscapes of mathematics and language. Our world of thought, our imagination and psyche are very important parts of the territory. People try to fathom the constraints of their inner world by reducing their contemplations to be solely about extrasensory perceptions. We might be able to understand everything from the outside but we’ll always only gain the algorithmic understanding that way. You might object that Mary won’t learn anything from experiencing the algorithm, but if Mary does indeed know everything about a given phenomenon then by definition she also knows how the algorithm feels from the inside. Understanding something means to assimilate a model of what is to be understood. Understanding something completely means to be able to compute its algorithm, it means to incorporate not just a model of something or the static description of an algorithm, it means to become the algorithm entirely. And that is what philosophers are doing, they are not trying to dissolve human nature by formulating a static description but evoke the dynamic state sequence from the human machine by computing the algorithm.
And from what did you learn about the idea of evolution, and whence observe anything connected to the abstraction ‘instinct’?
What I meant by ‘evolutionary prior’ is all information available to us that are not a result of the stimulation of sensory receptors. This can be genetically programmed memory or the architecture of the computational substrate. It doesn’t matter if we were shaped by evolution, even a Boltzmann brain will contain extrasensory information. The basic point I tried to make is that philosophy can partly be seen as an art that tries to fathom the possibilities and constraints of our minds by experiencing, i.e. computing, the human algorithm. I am not trying to argue that the way Yudkowsky wants to fathom human nature is wrong, it is indeed the superior way of gaining functional knowledge. But the behavior of the human algorithm is sufficiently complicated that it is not possible to work out the behavior by other means than performing the computation. In other words, the dynamic state sequence that can be evoked from the human machine by computing the algorithm is not merely complicated but complex, that is unpredictable. Philosophers are computing the algorithm to learn more about its behavior. Philosophers also study the behavior of systems of human algorithms by computing the interaction with other philosophers. Doing so philosophers are able to investigate the emergent phenomena of those systems. All those phenomena reduce entirely to the physical facts but physical systems can have properties that their parts alone do not. Those properties can not be predicted in advance but only discovered by computing the system.
Isn’t this missing our evolutionary prior, our instinct? And what argument can be made against privileged philosophical insight? That the map is not the territory is only partly true as the map is part of the territory and everyone can explore and alter their map and therefore alter the territory. That is what is happening when philosophers and mathematicians explore the abstract landscapes of mathematics and language. Our world of thought, our imagination and psyche are very important parts of the territory. People try to fathom the constraints of their inner world by reducing their contemplations to be solely about extrasensory perceptions. We might be able to understand everything from the outside but we’ll always only gain the algorithmic understanding that way. You might object that Mary won’t learn anything from experiencing the algorithm, but if Mary does indeed know everything about a given phenomenon then by definition she also knows how the algorithm feels from the inside. Understanding something means to assimilate a model of what is to be understood. Understanding something completely means to be able to compute its algorithm, it means to incorporate not just a model of something or the static description of an algorithm, it means to become the algorithm entirely. And that is what philosophers are doing, they are not trying to dissolve human nature by formulating a static description but evoke the dynamic state sequence from the human machine by computing the algorithm.
And from what did you learn about the idea of evolution, and whence observe anything connected to the abstraction ‘instinct’?
What I meant by ‘evolutionary prior’ is all information available to us that are not a result of the stimulation of sensory receptors. This can be genetically programmed memory or the architecture of the computational substrate. It doesn’t matter if we were shaped by evolution, even a Boltzmann brain will contain extrasensory information. The basic point I tried to make is that philosophy can partly be seen as an art that tries to fathom the possibilities and constraints of our minds by experiencing, i.e. computing, the human algorithm. I am not trying to argue that the way Yudkowsky wants to fathom human nature is wrong, it is indeed the superior way of gaining functional knowledge. But the behavior of the human algorithm is sufficiently complicated that it is not possible to work out the behavior by other means than performing the computation. In other words, the dynamic state sequence that can be evoked from the human machine by computing the algorithm is not merely complicated but complex, that is unpredictable. Philosophers are computing the algorithm to learn more about its behavior. Philosophers also study the behavior of systems of human algorithms by computing the interaction with other philosophers. Doing so philosophers are able to investigate the emergent phenomena of those systems. All those phenomena reduce entirely to the physical facts but physical systems can have properties that their parts alone do not. Those properties can not be predicted in advance but only discovered by computing the system.