Given our discussion on the “territory” essay about how the “in contact with the territory vs. all in the map” distinction has been confusing me, I’ve been trying to find a way to think about the “observing vs. merely seeing” distinction without identifying it with the other one.
{My first attempt to phrase it that seems to be actually at all helping with my confusion} is this: “Observation (in the relevant sense) is bringing my {anticipations / implicit models} in contact with something that might {contradict / resist / collide with / set / correct / change} them in a way that would make them better reflect the territory.” (Where by “might” I mean something like “has a reasonably good chance to”.)
Thus under this attempted definition, doing math about, say, star formation could be “observation” in the relevant sense (about the stars, not just about math) even though it doesn’t involve directly getting data from the stars, because it can collide with a person’s implicit models of how star formation works in a way that would tend to cause them to reflect reality better. And, of course, directly recording data from a telescope and using it to test hypotheses would be observation.
On the other hand, repeatedly walking up the stairs without paying attention would not be (much) observation of the stairs, because it would be very unlikely to change my anticipations about things like how many steps there are. And moreover, counting how many numbers there are on my bedroom clock would also not be much observation (of what the clock is like), even though it does involve getting data directly from the clock, because it would also be very unlikely to change my anticipations about the clock (because I am very confident that I know the answer).
I’m not sure whether “observation” is actually a good handle for the cluster I’m drawing here, but I think I probably do think that the cluster I’m drawing here helps me with cashing out the phrase “contact with the territory” in “knowing the territory takes patient and direct contact with the territory” in a way that isn’t based on the “in contact with the territory vs. all in the map” dichotomy.
I keep wanting to add something to this comment about how this attempted definition might apply to something like Googling or asking an expert, but I think I actually still have too much confusion there, and I guess the comment seems sufficiently worthwhile to me even without that.
[meta note: what i’m doing above is trying to find articulations of the intuitive picture that is emerging in my mind, which is hopefully in the vicinity of what you Logan meant to communicate but might not be]
This comment is about something I’m confused about, and I’m sufficiently confused about it that I can’t write it as a clearly-articulated question or statement. Its current state is more like a confused question that my brain in trying to untangle as I’m reading this sequence. So I’ll probably meander, and the meandering probably won’t come together into a clear satisfying thing by the end of this comment.
A big reason I’m interested in Logan-style naturalism is that you (Logan) frequently say things about it that resonate with ways in which I approach my own work. The most salient instance is your concept of “pre-conceptual intimacy”:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EKc4RfKhPRmnLtRXn/research-facilitation-invitation
There is a particular mode that I’m in when I do what I think of as my best work, and this paragraph reminds me of it. Although, hm, now that I actually have it in front of me, most of the details don’t quite match… but I think that’s mostly because most of the words in this paragraph are about pre-existing concepts, and when I’m in this mode, I mostly just don’t pay attention to any concepts that don’t currently fit.
–I think I maybe only feel particularly disoriented when I have pre-existing concepts that don’t fit, but still feel like they encapsulate something important that I don’t want to lose sight of?–
Anyway, when I try to correct for these things, “pre-conceptual intimacy” seems to resonate a lot with this mode that I sometimes work in.
However, an aspect of the description above that still doesn’t match is that, when I’m working in this mode, I’m not in any very obvious way making any observations. It seems like most of what I’m doing is that I’m having a vague confused intuition, and I, uh. I bump them around in my head until they maybe turn into concepts that make sense, or are at least a little more like that? (Turns out that I don’t actually particularly know how to describe the thing.)
It wouldn’t be incorrect, I think, to say that I’m looking at two parts of my map that are inconsistent with each other, and I’m trying to make them consistent, or I’m looking at one part of my map (my confused intuition) and I try to use it to fill in a different, blank part of my map.
This seems obviously right for literal cartography. I want to talk, as part of my meandering, about how it might apply to math. I don’t actually feel confused about math, I just find it a helpful example.
It seems to me that, on the one hand, (most) math research could be described as being all about staring at some parts of your map and trying to use them to fill in other parts of your map. But–
–but on the other hand, math certainly resists my expectations according to its own rules. Moreover, when I try to do prove a math result, I am in contact with that resistance: I get feedback from the territory (of math), even though it seems like in some sense it wouldn’t be incorrect to say that all I am doing is to stare at different parts of my map.
I think this is somehow an important node in my confusion (though, again, I don’t actually feel confused about math): When reading your posts, I seem to have formed a, uh, story? frame?, that says that {getting feedback from the territory} is important and that it is sort of the opposite of {merely staring at your map}. So if I think of doing math as both “getting feedback from the territory” and “nothing but staring at your map”, that breaks that model.
Maybe this just means that I should not think of math proofs as happening all in the map; maybe I should say that because doing math proofs gives me feedback about the way that math resists my expectations, therefore by definition it is not happening all in my map.
…I feel uncomfortable and kind of dirty about the previous paragraph, and that’s after working on it for a while trying to make it less bad. As written, it seems to be saying: I have formed a picture of a constellation in my head, and now I’m looking at the sky and there is no star where my mental picture says there should be one; and I now want to know whether the real constellation instead has this nearby star or that one. Sometimes it genuinely makes sense to ask “does this way of thinking about things feel more revealing, or that one?” But in this case, it just feels like a wrong question. The real thing inside me I would like to convey is that I’m mentally lightly touching on each of the two pictures I could draw, getting in touch with how both feel somewhat right but fairly wrong, because touching on what the world looks like from these two wrong perspectives jiggers something around in my head that makes me feel that I’m a little closer to resolving my confusion.
Maybe this just means that I should not think of math proofs as happening all in the map; maybe I should say that because doing math proofs gives me feedback about the way that math resists my expectations, therefore by definition it is not happening all in my map.
But suppose I’m a physicist. I spend some of my time doing experiments, and I spend some of my time thinking about physics and about my experiments, and as I do the latter, I frequently do math. I’m not interested in studying math, the thing I want to study is physics, but math is an important tool for doing so. And when I use this tool, it resists my expectations just as it does when I do math for its own sake; once I have a formal model of some physical phenomenon, math tells me something about what to expect from my physical observations in a way that does not care what I think, or what I happened to imagine. But it feels like in the case of physics, something important is captured by saying that my experiments are making direct contact with the territory of physics, whereas the math I do is all in my map.
Worse, consider Einstein when he said that if Eddington’s attempt to verify General Relativity had failed, “Then I would have felt sorry for the dear Lord. The theory is correct.” [1] At this point, he had obviously done a lot of math about GR, but the math couldn’t have given him that confidence that the theory was correct; given how little empirical observation [2] it was based on, it must have been {philosophical arguments slash his sense of how physics worked} that allowed him to come to this conclusion. And for him to predict so well on so little data, his philosophical intuitions must somehow have had the power to resist expectations according to their own rules, not in the way physics experiments do, but kind of close to the way mathematical calculations do. But if we tried to say that Einstein’s philosophical intuitions didn’t happen in the map, then… would any sort of thinking that actually does anything useful count as “happening in the map”?
[1] Each source I’ve checked seems to give a slightly different quote and story, which, uuuh, but anyway.
[2] (Empirical observation distinguishing it from Newtonian mechanics, I mean.)
I think that I personally have a tendency to spend a lot of time thinking about my map, and that I could, in many domains I care about, benefit from noticing a bunch of low-hanging fruit in making more direct observations. But I don’t actually think that {what I consider to be my highest-quality work} to be an example of this. I mean, that work is certainly informed by intuitions I’ve formed in contact with present day machine-learning systems, or by doing math, or by watching my own thinking. But it’s not, I think, made of contact with these things, and my contact with the territory (AGI alignment) seems to me about as tenuous as Einstein’s with his. I think that the best work I do is in fact made up of thinking about what some existing parts of my map can tell me about what should be in other parts of my map.
So what am I to make of naturalism, or “Knowing the territory takes patient and direct observation”?
One story I could try to tell is that naturalism won’t have much to tell me about the part of my work I consider most important. I could either say that “Knowing the territory takes patient and direct observation” is false because sometimes you can come to deep understanding of the territory just by thinking about it; or I could perhaps say that it’s true, and that just thinking is useful but isn’t enough to give you deep mastery of the subject; or I guess I could say that my approach to my work is just fundamentally doomed.
This story may be true. But it doesn’t currently ring true, because it doesn’t explain why numerous things you’ve said about naturalism have had such a strong resonance with my model of my work process.
When I do my thing that is in fact mostly “just thinking about it”, I have a distinction in my head that I track with my felt sense, which feels as if it’s tracking “whether I’m interacting with the real thing, or merely making up stories about it”. In the first case, I feel like I am in contact with something that can resist my expectations (although in truth this thing is itself made of anticipations).
I very much have habits for this kind of work that rhyme with patience: I approach it with a frame of mind that “isn’t expecting to find answers today”, that is looking at the feeling of the thought on the tip of my tongue and pokes around in that vicinity but isn’t expecting to be able to articulate that thought by any particular point in time. I look at the problem from this perspective and from that perspective, and feel successful if this shifts something in my felt sense that makes me feel a little bit less confused.
And there is an experience and sensation there that, as a felt sense, very much resonates with the idea of peeling back interpretative layers and increasing sensation at the point of contact, and with the metaphor of being “naked” in contact with the thing.
Maybe all of this is me missing you and interpreting your words in terms of something I’m familiar with. But what I actually think is going on is that your words are painting a picture of a constellation in my head that sort-of-but-not-quite matches the stars I see in the night sky; and that there is some nearby picture that does make sense of what I’m seeing; but I, like, just really don’t know what that picture looks like, yet. (And so I look at it from this wrong perspective and from that one, and notice how that shifts my felt sense of it a little and makes me feel a little less confused–which is why I had to write a long meandering semi-essay in order to be able to say anything detailed about it at all.)