Before talking about your (quite fun) post, I first want to point out a failure mode exemplified by Scott’s “The View From Ground Level.” Here’s how he gets into trouble (or begins trolling): first he is confused about consciousness. Then he postulates a unified thing—“consciousness” proper—that he’s confused about. Finally he makes an argument that manipulates this thing as if it were a substance or essence. These sorts of arguments never work. Just because there’s a cloud, doesn’t mean that there’s a thing inside the cloud precisely shaped like the area obscured by the cloud.
Okay, on to my reaction to this post.
When trying to ground weird questions about point-of-view and information, one useful question is “what would a Solomonoff inductor think?” The really short version of why we can take advice from a Solomonoff inductor is that there is no such thing as a uniform prior over everything—if you try to put a uniform prior over everything, you’re trying to assign each hypothesis a probability of 1/infinity, which is zero, which is not a good probability to give everything. (You can play tricks that effectively involve canceling out this infinite entropy with some source of infinite information, but let’s stick to the finite-information world). To have a probability distribution over infinite hypotheses, you need to play favorites. And this sounds a lot like Solomonoff’s “hypotheses that are simple to encode for some universal Turing machine should be higher on the list.”
So what would a Solomonoff inductor think about themselves? Do they think they’re the “naive encoding,” straightforwardly controlling a body in some hypothesized “real world?” Or are they one of the infinitely many “latent encodings,” where the real world isn’t what it seems and the inductor’s perceptions are instead generated by some complicated mapping from the state of the world to the memories of the inductor?
The answer is that the Solomonoff inductor prefers the naive encoding. We’re pretty sure my memories are (relatively) simple to explain if you hypothesize my physical body. But if you hypothesize that my memories are encoded in the spray from a waterfall, the size of the Turing machine required to translate waterfall-spray into my memories gets really big. One of the features of Solomonoff inductors that’s vital to their nice properties is that hypotheses become more unlikely faster than they become more numerous. There are an infinite number of ways that my memories might be encoded in a waterfall, or in the left foot of George Clooney, or even in my own brain. But arranged in order of complexity of the encoding, these infinite possibilities get exponentially unlikely, so that their sum remains small.
So the naive encoding comes out unscathed when it comes to myself. But what about other people? Here I agree the truth has to be unintuitive, but I’d be a bit more eliminitavist than you. You say “all those experiences exist,” I’d say “in that sense, none of them exist.”
From the point of view of the Solomonoff inductor, there is just the real world hypothesized to explain our data. Other people are just things in the real world. We presume that they exist because that presumption has explanatory power.
You might say that the Solomonoff inductor is being hypocritical here. It assumes that my body has some special bridging law to some sort of immaterial soul, some Real Self that is doing the Solomonoff-inducting, but it doesn’t extend that assumption to other people. To be cosmopolitan, you’d say, we should speculate about the bridging laws that might connect experiences to our world like hairs on a supremely shaggy dog.
I’d say that maybe this is the point where me and the Solomonoff inductor part ways, because I don’t think I actually have an immaterial soul, it’s just a useful perspective to take sometimes. I’d like to think I’m actually doing some kind of naturalized induction that we don’t quite know how to formalize yet, that allows for the fact that the thing doing the inducting might actually be part of the real world, not floating outside it, attached only by an umbilical cord.
I don’t just care about people because I think they have bridging laws that connect them to their Real Experiences; any hypotheses about Real Experiences in my description of the world are merely convenient fictions that could be disposed of if only I was Laplace’s demon.
I think that in the ultimate generalization of how we care about things, the one that works even when all the weirdnesses of the world are allowed, things that are fictional will not be made fundamental. Which is to say, the reason I don’t care about all the encodings of me that could be squeezed into every mundane object I encounter isn’t because they all cancel out by some phenomenal symmetry argument, it’s because I don’t care about those encodings at all. They are, in some deep sense, so weird I don’t care about them, and I think that such a gradient that fades off into indifference is a fundamental part of any realistic account of what physical systems we care about.
Comment status: long.
Before talking about your (quite fun) post, I first want to point out a failure mode exemplified by Scott’s “The View From Ground Level.” Here’s how he gets into trouble (or begins trolling): first he is confused about consciousness. Then he postulates a unified thing—“consciousness” proper—that he’s confused about. Finally he makes an argument that manipulates this thing as if it were a substance or essence. These sorts of arguments never work. Just because there’s a cloud, doesn’t mean that there’s a thing inside the cloud precisely shaped like the area obscured by the cloud.
Okay, on to my reaction to this post.
When trying to ground weird questions about point-of-view and information, one useful question is “what would a Solomonoff inductor think?” The really short version of why we can take advice from a Solomonoff inductor is that there is no such thing as a uniform prior over everything—if you try to put a uniform prior over everything, you’re trying to assign each hypothesis a probability of 1/infinity, which is zero, which is not a good probability to give everything. (You can play tricks that effectively involve canceling out this infinite entropy with some source of infinite information, but let’s stick to the finite-information world). To have a probability distribution over infinite hypotheses, you need to play favorites. And this sounds a lot like Solomonoff’s “hypotheses that are simple to encode for some universal Turing machine should be higher on the list.”
So what would a Solomonoff inductor think about themselves? Do they think they’re the “naive encoding,” straightforwardly controlling a body in some hypothesized “real world?” Or are they one of the infinitely many “latent encodings,” where the real world isn’t what it seems and the inductor’s perceptions are instead generated by some complicated mapping from the state of the world to the memories of the inductor?
The answer is that the Solomonoff inductor prefers the naive encoding. We’re pretty sure my memories are (relatively) simple to explain if you hypothesize my physical body. But if you hypothesize that my memories are encoded in the spray from a waterfall, the size of the Turing machine required to translate waterfall-spray into my memories gets really big. One of the features of Solomonoff inductors that’s vital to their nice properties is that hypotheses become more unlikely faster than they become more numerous. There are an infinite number of ways that my memories might be encoded in a waterfall, or in the left foot of George Clooney, or even in my own brain. But arranged in order of complexity of the encoding, these infinite possibilities get exponentially unlikely, so that their sum remains small.
So the naive encoding comes out unscathed when it comes to myself. But what about other people? Here I agree the truth has to be unintuitive, but I’d be a bit more eliminitavist than you. You say “all those experiences exist,” I’d say “in that sense, none of them exist.”
From the point of view of the Solomonoff inductor, there is just the real world hypothesized to explain our data. Other people are just things in the real world. We presume that they exist because that presumption has explanatory power.
You might say that the Solomonoff inductor is being hypocritical here. It assumes that my body has some special bridging law to some sort of immaterial soul, some Real Self that is doing the Solomonoff-inducting, but it doesn’t extend that assumption to other people. To be cosmopolitan, you’d say, we should speculate about the bridging laws that might connect experiences to our world like hairs on a supremely shaggy dog.
I’d say that maybe this is the point where me and the Solomonoff inductor part ways, because I don’t think I actually have an immaterial soul, it’s just a useful perspective to take sometimes. I’d like to think I’m actually doing some kind of naturalized induction that we don’t quite know how to formalize yet, that allows for the fact that the thing doing the inducting might actually be part of the real world, not floating outside it, attached only by an umbilical cord.
I don’t just care about people because I think they have bridging laws that connect them to their Real Experiences; any hypotheses about Real Experiences in my description of the world are merely convenient fictions that could be disposed of if only I was Laplace’s demon.
I think that in the ultimate generalization of how we care about things, the one that works even when all the weirdnesses of the world are allowed, things that are fictional will not be made fundamental. Which is to say, the reason I don’t care about all the encodings of me that could be squeezed into every mundane object I encounter isn’t because they all cancel out by some phenomenal symmetry argument, it’s because I don’t care about those encodings at all. They are, in some deep sense, so weird I don’t care about them, and I think that such a gradient that fades off into indifference is a fundamental part of any realistic account of what physical systems we care about.