Logos01

Karma: 312

Logos01 21 Jul 2011 19:27 UTC
9 points
in reply to: kybernetikos’s comment on: Secrets of the eliminati

Just because something only exists at high levels of abstraction doesn’t mean it’s not real or explanatory.

I have often stated that, as a physicalist, the mere fact that something does not independently exist—that is, it has no physically discrete existence—does not mean it isn’t real. The number three is real—but does not exist. It cannot be touched, sensed, or measured; yet if there are three rocks there really are three rocks. I define “real” as “a pattern that proscriptively constrains that which exists”. A human mind is real; but there is no single part of your physical body you can point to and say, “this is your mind”. You are the pattern that your physical components conform to.

It seems very often that objections to reductionism are founded in a problem of scale: the inability to recognize that things which are real from one perspective remain real at that perspective even if we consider a different scale.

It would seem, to me, that “eliminativism” is essentially a redux of this quandary but in terms of patterns of thought rather than discrete material. It’s still a case of missing the forest for the trees.

Logos01 29 Aug 2011 13:42 UTC
0 points
on: Math is Subjunctively Objective
It helps to differentiate between “real” and “existant”. Mathematics is as real as the laws of logic—neither, however, exists.

What is “real” is that which proscriptively constraints that which exists. That which exists is that which interacts directly with other phenomena which also exist (that also interact).

When we say “2+3=5” what we are doing is engaging in the definition of real patterns of that which exists. So while, yes, the patterns themselves are external to us; the terms we assign them are subjective. In mathematics we ‘understand’ what happens when you add 2 and 3 together. But these are just symbols; just representations by which we predict outcomes based upon our understanding of those constraining patterns. In other words; we define 0 as none of a thing, and 1 as a single thing. We therefore define 2 as 1+1, 3 as 1+1+1, etc., etc.. (The dots).

However, if we were to encounter a person who defined 6 as 1+1+1+1+1, and we were to continue definining 1+1+1+1+1 as five, then neither would agree with one another, and both would be correct. This is, given the understanding involved of the difference between “real” and “existent”, neither exceptional nor inscrutable. It’s a trick of definition—much as is the Law of Identity and the Law of the Excluded Middle. (That which I define as “only-A” cannot ever simultaneously be “not-A”.)

Logos01 30 Aug 2011 6:17 UTC
0 points
on: Philosophical apologetics book suggests replacing Bayes theorem with “Inference to the Best Explanation” (IBE)

Obviously the key lies in their definition of “ideal explanation.”

That seems non-obvious to me. It’s highly problematic, sure—but not “key”. “Key” is “adequate range of data”. That cannot be an objective measure. It occurs to me that Bayes’ theorem has no such problem; it simply takes additional input and revises its conclusions as they come—it makes no presumption of its conclusions necessarily being representative of absolute truth.

I also, personally, take objection to:

(2) It is not highly unlikely that a world-creator exists.

I find it is highly unlikely that “a world-creator” exists. For two reasons. 1) Our universe necessarily possesses an infinite history (Big Bang + Special Relativity says this.) 2) Any ruleset which allows for spontaneous manifestation of an agentless system is by definition less unlikely than the rulesets which allow for the spontaneous manifestation of an agent that can itself manifest rulesets. (The latter being a subset of the former, and possessed of greater ‘complexity’—an ugly term but there just isn’t a better one I am familiar with; in this case I use it to mean “more pieces that could go wrong if not assembled ‘precisely so’.)

I can’t say, as a person who is still neutral on this whole “Bayesian theory” thing (i.e.; I feel no special attachment to the idea and can’t say I entirely agree with the notion that our universe in no ways truly behaves probabilistically) -- I can’t say that this topic as related is at all convincing.

Logos01 30 Aug 2011 9:09 UTC
13 points
in reply to: JoshuaZ’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 8

One could get around that by having a gun type fission bomb with something other than explosives to launch the bullet (say compressed gas).

You’re making this too complicated. As evidenced by the levitate-slowly-to-the-ground spell, they’ve already got magics in-universe that impede the maximum kinetic energy of an object.

Just surround the entire area with a field that inhibits maximum relative velocities to something an arrow could achieve. No more guns, no more bombs, no more nukes. Problem solved.

Logos01 30 Aug 2011 9:15 UTC
11 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 8

Hm. In Chapter 74, we learn that all ritual magic requires a sacrifice, and Harry muses about all the pulled punches in wizard warfare. Iiinteresting.

Especially since Quirrell/Voldemort specifically mentions that it is possible to sacrifice “a portion” of one’s own magical power—permanently—to achieve ‘great effects’. I imagine a nefarious individual could conceive of a rite whereby the sacrifice of another wizard’s life—and by extension, his magic—would cause at least some portion of that magic to be transferred to yourself.

Perhaps older wizards were more powerful because… they had more power? One could easily conceive of Godric Griffindor using this method of execution upon potential Dark Lords in order to combat more-powerful ones.

Logos01 30 Aug 2011 13:07 UTC
0 points
in reply to: prase’s comment on: Philosophical apologetics book suggests replacing Bayes theorem with “Inference to the Best Explanation” (IBE)
Here’s a thought experiment for you: Imagine that you’ve decided to take a short walk to the black hole at the corner 7-11 / Circle-K / ‘Kwik-E-Mart’. How long will it take you to reach the event horizon? (The answer, of course, is that you never will.)

As you approach the event horizon of a quantum singularity, time is distorted until it reaches an infinitessimal rate of progression. The Bing Bang states that the entire universe inflated from a single point; a singularity. The same rules, thusly govern—in reverse; the first instants of the universe took an infinitely long period of time to progress.

It helps if you think of this as a two-dimensional graph, with the history of the universe as a line. As we approach the origin mark, the graph of history curves; the “absolute zero instant” of the Universe is, thusly, shown to be an asymptotic limit; a point that can only ever be approached but never, ever reached.

Logos01 30 Aug 2011 13:19 UTC
0 points
on: That cat: not dead and alive

But if we could manage to magically “freeze time” then we would find ourselves in one position in configuration space where the particle is unambiguously in one position (let’s say the left slit).

It is not my understanding (I am a layman) that this is an appropriate statement to make: I don’t think that even the frozen-time point would show the particle to be in a discrete position. I tend to the belief that the ‘wave’ portion of quantum wave/particle duality represents the many probabilities co-existing within our physical universe. I’m aware this disagrees with the basic Bayesian assumption of non-frequentism, but I’m not prepared to get into that argument at this time. (I tend towards Bayesian thinking in all other ways, just not on this point.)

Anyhow—the point is, while when discussing the exact manners in which a given particle can interact with others, it is only relevant to discuss its particle-nature; when discussing its opportunities to interact, it is only relevant to discuss its probability-spaces. As multiple probabilities tend to interact by forming subsets of available probabilities, and as ‘larger scale’ physics is composed definitionally of complex systems, this would tend to ‘factor out’ towards the blissfully deterministic-appearing world we see in the “Middle World”.

The consequence of this notion, however, is that as the Cat/box system has a radioisotope whose decay triggers the release of the toxin; the presence of both possibilities means that the system at the Newtonian scale will behave as though the isotope had decayed. In which case, you’ve got yourself one dead cat.

I am quite certain that someone of greater expertise would rip this comment to shreds, and I invite the opportunity to be educated. :)

Logos01 30 Aug 2011 13:54 UTC
0 points
in reply to: prase’s comment on: Philosophical apologetics book suggests replacing Bayes theorem with “Inference to the Best Explanation” (IBE)
Correct, but since the entire universe was at that singularity, the distortion of time is relevant.

Logos01 30 Aug 2011 15:05 UTC
−1 points
in reply to: prase’s comment on: Philosophical apologetics book suggests replacing Bayes theorem with “Inference to the Best Explanation” (IBE)
Yes and no. Since the first second took an infinitely long period of time to occur.

Logos01 31 Aug 2011 2:33 UTC
0 points
in reply to: prase’s comment on: Philosophical apologetics book suggests replacing Bayes theorem with “Inference to the Best Explanation” (IBE)
The latter statement conforms to my understanding of the topic.

Logos01 31 Aug 2011 5:12 UTC
2 points
in reply to: jhuffman’s comment on: Do you expect a singularity within your life time?

If we make a brain by simulating neurons then making it superhuman is a matter of throwing hardware at it,

Not really. No matter what you do, if your simulation speed is optimized to the best of your current know-how, expanding additional hardware once you reach full simulation will only be wasted resources. And then you run into lightspeed constraints and bus/bandwidth limitations.

I.e.; if we don’t have the hardware you can’t “just throw more hardware at it”.

and it could certainly help design better hardware.

There is an underlying assumption here that a simulated brain would operate faster than a human’s. That’s by no means necessarily true. Anyone familiar with virtualization performance knows you take a performance hit as compared to bare-metal when you do full virtualization.

Logos01 31 Aug 2011 5:14 UTC
3 points
in reply to: jhuffman’s comment on: Do you expect a singularity within your life time?

I remember thinking that 20 years ago. We don’t seem much closer.

Twenty years ago we didn’t have the Methuselah or SENS foundations; nor was antiagapic research considered viable for mainstream medicine. Today these things are.

Logos01 31 Aug 2011 11:13 UTC
0 points
in reply to: prase’s comment on: Philosophical apologetics book suggests replacing Bayes theorem with “Inference to the Best Explanation” (IBE)

But now, how does that justify talking about infinite history?

How does it not? It’s a true statement: the graph of our history is infinitely long.

Coordinate time has no physical meaning,

I can’t agree with that statement.

and it’s possible to choose the coordinates in such a way to have the time difference finite.

That much is true, but it fails to reveal explicably the nature of why the question, “What happened before the Big Bang?” as being as meaningless as “What’s further North than the North Pole?”

Logos01 2 Sep 2011 0:00 UTC
0 points
in reply to: jhuffman’s comment on: Do you expect a singularity within your life time?

The extent to which that is practical is really the governor here since parallel scalability would really mean that we can throw more hardware at it until the cost of communicating between nodes exceeds the benefit from having one more node.

I don’t think “nodes” is an entirely accurate statement here, however. But either way—the point I was making is that the hardware is itself going to be the biggest constraint in early-period devices. Furthermore, it’s not enough to simply integrate more nodes; those nodes need to have an actual role. Otherwise, bigger brains would result in smarter individuals. Yet elephants are not smarter than humans.

Logos01 2 Sep 2011 0:03 UTC
1 point
in reply to: jwhendy’s comment on: Philosophical apologetics book suggests replacing Bayes theorem with “Inference to the Best Explanation” (IBE)

Re-reading, I think both are critical.

Critical I can agree to. “Key” is a more foundational term than “critical” in my ‘gut response’.

Could you explain this? I thought that the fact that our universe did behave probabilistically was the whole point of Bayes’ theorem.

The below might help:

The frequentists definition sees probability as the long-run expected frequency of occurrence. P(A) = n/N, where n is the number of times event A occurs in N opportunities. The Bayesian view of probability is related to degree of belief. It is a measure of the plausibility of an event given incomplete knowledge.

In other words; a Bayesian believes that each trial will have a set outcome that isn’t ‘fuzzy’ even at the time the trial is initiated. The frequentist on the other hand believes that probability makes reality itself fuzzy until the trial concludes. If you had a sufficiently accurate predicting robot, to the Bayesian, it would be ‘right’ in one million out of one million coin flips by a robotic arm. To the frequentist, on the other hand, that sort of accuracy is impossible.

Now, I believe Bayesian statistical modeling to be vastly more effective at modeling our reality. However, I don’t think that belief is incompatible with a foundational belief that our universe is probabilistic rather than deterministic.

Logos01 2 Sep 2011 4:31 UTC
1 point
in reply to: jwhendy’s comment on: Philosophical apologetics book suggests replacing Bayes theorem with “Inference to the Best Explanation” (IBE)

My initial response was, “No way Bayesians really believe that.”

When I was first introduced to the concept of Bayesian statistics, I had rather lengthy conversations on just this very example.

Either way, what you mean by “sufficiently accurate” might need some explaining.

“Sufficiently accurate” means “sufficiently accurate”, in this case. sufficient: being as much as needed; accurate. Synthesize the two and you have “being as without error and precise as needed”. Can’t get more clear than that, I fear.

Now, if I can read into the question you’re tending to with the request—well… let’s put it this way; there is a phenomenon called stochastic resonance. We know that quantum-scale spacetime events do not have precise locations despite being discrete phenonema (wave-particle duality): this is why we don’t talk about ‘location’ but rather ‘configuration space’.

Now, which portion of the configuration space will interact with which other portion in which way is an entirely probabilistic process. To the Bayesians I’ve discussed the topic with at any length, this is where we go ‘sideways’; they believe as you espoused: know enough points of fact and you can make inerrant predictions; what’s really going to happen is set in stone before the trial is even conducted. Replay it a trillion, trillion times with the same exact original conditions and you will get the same results every single time. You just have to get the parameters EXACTLY the same.

I don’t believe that’s a true statement. I believe that there is and does exist material randomness and pseudorandomness; and I believe further that while we as humans cannot ever truly exactly measure the world’s probabilities but instead only take measurements and make estimates, those probabilities are real.

Logos01 2 Sep 2011 5:02 UTC
1 point
in reply to: jwhendy’s comment on: Philosophical apologetics book suggests replacing Bayes theorem with “Inference to the Best Explanation” (IBE)

Then again, perhaps your addition of “sufficiently” should have clued me in on the fact that you meant a machine that could know absolutely everything.

Funny thing. Just a few hours ago today, I was having a conversation with someone who said, “I need to remember, {Logos01}, that you use words in their literal meaning.”

I’m intuitively drawn to say that there is nothing actually random...

It’s a common intuition. I have the opposite intuition. As a layman, however, I don’t know enough to get our postulates in line with one another. So I’ll leave you to explore the topic yourself.

Logos01 2 Sep 2011 7:48 UTC
1 point
on: Contrarians judged mad after being proven right (John Hempton)
I’m not certain that the Sino Forest ‘case’ is a very good one for use here, from reading the lw’er’s “tl;dr” version of the full article.

Consider: While the “source” of information should not be used to evaluate the probability of that information’s accuracy, the manner in which information is delivered should. If an improper format of accreditation is used; if obvious and overt logical fallacies are present—that information would rightly be discounted from any estimate of the accuracy of a statement.

For example; I consider myself a strong/gnostic atheist. So for me, it is obvious that “atheism” is the “correct” answer. Should I encounter someone, however, whose sole reason for being an atheist was because their little sister died (WARNING: TVTROPES.org link!!) -- I would be forced to tell that person ve was being a complete moron, and that nobody should listen to ver reasoning.

The mere accident of a conclusion coinciding with the truth does not make that conclusion justified. As part of the assessment tools of judging the accreditation weighting we provide any given input, the ‘proper indicators of subject-expertise’ should weigh in highly. If a hobo with a speech impediment walks up to me on the street and tells me he’s got a surefire plan for making money on the stock-market written on the back of a Subway’s wrapper, I’m not going to be inclined to waste my time reading it. On the other hand, if a man makes the news from raking in billions over the course of a week from mere thousands and then offers me a secret algorithm that’s the source of his wealth, I’m going to take him quite seriously: because he’s got the right indicators of veracity of his beliefs.

Now, that being said—there needs to be a means to re-weight assessments of credulity of statemets to account for outlier positions. I would tend to believe that willingness to publicize resources and citing credible sources of data, rigorousness fo documentation of ‘radical’ claims, and so one would be useful to this end.

As Sagan said: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” While we should remember that’s just a heuristic—I don’t know that I see a problem here. Limited information and constant need for reassessment based on it means mistakes will be made. They are unavoidable. Do not let the perfect become the enemy of the good.

Logos01 2 Sep 2011 7:51 UTC
2 points
in reply to: RHollerith’s comment on: Job Postings?

(2) there already exist a robust set of services to inform job seekers of available jobs.

And yet many employee-seekers are unable to satisfy their demands for workers. There is a signal-to-noise problem here. Still, I don’t think LW is a proper forum for this sort of thing just yet. It’s too non-localized as compared to how employment operates, by necessity.

Logos01 2 Sep 2011 19:59 UTC
1 point
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: Contrarians judged mad after being proven right (John Hempton)
I’m personally wary of hindsight bias sort of stuff. Of course this all seems obvious to us now, but… would it have when we first examined it? I don’t know.