To my mind all such questions are related to arguments about solipcism, i.e. the notion that even other humans don’t, or may not, have minds/consciousness/qualia. The basic argument is that I can only see behavior (not mind) in anyone other than myself. Most everyone rejects solipsism, but I don’t know if there have actually many very good arguments against it, except that it is morally unappealing (if anyone know of any please point them out). I think the same questions hold regarding emulations, only even more so (at least with other humans we know they are physically similar, suggesting some possibility that they are mentally similar as well—not so with emulations*). Especially, I don’t see how there can ever be empirical evidence that anything is conscious or experiences qualia (or that anything is not conscious!): behavior isn’t strictly relevant, and other minds are non-perceptible. I think this is the most common objection to Turing-tests as a standard, as well.
*Maybe this is the logic of the biological position you mention—essentially, the more something seems like the one thing I know is conscious (me), the more likehood I assign to it also being conscious. Thus other humans > other complex animals > simple animals > other organisms > abiotics.
Hi, my name is Jason, this is my first post. I have recently been reading about 2 subjects here, Calibration and Solomoff Induction; reading them together has given me the following question:
How well-calibrated would Solomonoff Induction be if it could actually be calculated?
That is to say, if one generated priors on a whole bunch of questions based on information complexity measured in bits—if you took all the hypotheses that were measured at 10% likely—would 10% of those actually turn out to be correct?
I don’t immediately see why Solomonoff Induction should be expected to be well-calibrated. It appears to just be a formalization of Occam’s Razor, which itself is just a rule of thumb. But if it turned out not to be well-calibrated, it would not be a very good “recipe for truth.” What am I missing?