Metaphysical claims like OI are typically argued on the basis of abduction, ie as a better explanation for existing data.
I say typically, because I am not sure that the claims in question work that way.
TAG
Karma: 239
But you still don’t have an apriori guarantee that a computable model will succeed—that doesn’t follow from the claim that the human mind operated within computable limits. You could be facing evidence that all computable models must fail, in which case you should adopt a negative belief about physical/naturalism, even if you don’t adopt a positive belief in some supernatural model.
Since the topic is metaphysics , and metaphysics is about what reality really is, the relevant question is whether the world contains hypercomputation.
Physics is not the territory, physics is (quite explicitly) the models we have of the territory.
People tend to use the word physics in both the map and the territory sense.
We can imagine, to a point, that we live in a universe which contains hypercomputers, but since our own brain is not a hypercomputer, we can never fully test such a theory.
That would follow if testing a theory consisted of solely running a simulation in your head, but that is not how physics, the science, works. If the universe was hypercomputational, that would manifest as failures of computatable physics. Note that you only need to run computable physics to generate predictions that are then falsified.
This IMO is the most fundumental significance of the Church-Turing thesis: since we only perceive the world through the lens of our own mind, then from our subjective point of view, the world only contains computable processes.
If true, that is a form of neo-Kantian idealism. Is that what you really wanted to say?
Algorithmic information theory and AI theory show a clear path towards formalizing metaphysics.
If you define metaphysics as being concerned with deciding between natural and supernatural explanations, the techniques we currently have that are based algorithmic complexity aren’t doing a great job.
The problem is that our standard notions of computational limits is based on physical limitations - - the topic of hypercomputation deals, with the computation that might be possible absent physical limits - - so there is a question begging assumption of physicalism built in.
if the universe is sufficiently large, whatever pattern in matter constitutes “you” will have multiple identical instances. There is no fact of the matter as to which “one” you are. The patterns are identical, so you are all of them. When you make a choice, you choose for all of them, because they are identical, they have no ability to be different.
Copies of you that arise purely from the size of the universe will have the same counterfacutal or funcitonal behaviour, that is they will do the same thing under the same circumstances...but they will not, in general, do the same thing because they are not in the same circumstances. (There is also the issue that being in different circumstances and making different decisions will feed back into your personality and alter it).
I don’t think the argument is strong whatever you call it.
It could be argued that it’s all ignorance. The die will roll the way that physics demands, based on the velocity, roll, pitch, yaw of the die, and the surface properties of the felt.
Assuming physics is deterministic, which is not known to be the case.
You can, if you like, believe that there is unknowability at the quantum level, but even that doesn’t imply true randomness, just ignorance of which branch you’ll find your perceptive trail following
Assuming MWI is the correct interpretation of QM, which is also not known to he the case.
The testability criteria are not only intended to demarcate science, but also meaning.
Intended by Popper? What you are saying sounds much more like logical positivism.
Interesting that the problems with Aumann’s theorem were pointed out ten years ago, but belief in it continues to be prevalent.
[...] requires each party to assume the other is completely rational and honest. [/..] But assuming that the other party is in fact totally rational is just silly.
Assuming honesty is pretty problematical, too. In real-world disputes, participants are likely to disagree about what constitutes evidence (“the Bible says..”), aren’t rational, and suspect each others honesty.
The reason I’m focusing on this is that I think some of the phrasings you chose in trying to summarize Kant (and translate or steelman his views) are sliding between the three different claims I described above:
[1] “We can’t know things about ultimate reality without relying on initially unjustified knowledge/priors/cognitive machinery.” [2] “We can’t know things about ultimate reality.” [3] “(We can know that) ultimate reality is wildly different from reality-as-we-conceive-of-it.”
With regard to Kant’s claims, there is no “sliding” because he asserts all 3 of those, and provides separate arguments for them. In particular, [3] is supported by the Antinomies, which purport to show that spatiality is not a property of objective reality. He is not deriving everything from a single argument, any other than Berkeley is.
You can’t be misled about the sense of having an insight.
But you can be misled about *actually having * an insight, since your insight module is as capable of misfiring as anything else.
I downvoted TAG’s comment because I found it confusing/misleading.
You could have asked for clarification. The point is that Yudkowsky’s early movement was disjoint from actual AI research, and during that period a bunch of dogmas and approaches became solidified, which a lot of AI researchers (Russell is an exception) find incomprehensible or misguided. In other words, you can disapprove of amateur AI safety without dismissing AI safety wholesale.
Aumanns theorem assumes there is no ambiguity or disagreement about what counts as evidence or information in the first place. In the real world, that is the major barrier to achieving agreement.
I guess I’m just still not sure what you expect the oughts to be doing.
I was assuming that the point was that “oughts” and “ises” aren’t completely disjoint, as a crude understanding of the “is-ought divide” might suggest.
I think one of the reasons people are poking holes or bringing up non-”ought”-compliant agents is that we expect humans to sometimes be non-compliant too. This goes back to my question of whether every agent has some oughts, or whether every (sufficiently smart/rational/etc) agent would be impacted by every ought. If you give me a big list of oughts, I’ll give you a big list of ways humans violate them.
If you assume something like moral realism, so that there is some list of “oughts” that are categorical, so that they don’t relate to specific kinds of agents or specific situations, then it is likely that humans are violating most of them.
But moral realism is hard to justify.
On the other hand, given the premises that
moral norms are just one kind of norm
norms are always ways of performing a function or achieving an end
then you can come up with a constructivist metaethics that avoids the pitfalls of nihilism, relativism and realism. (I think. No idea if that is what Jesicata is saying).
If by “ought” claims you mean things we assign truth values that aren’t derivable from is-statements, then I agree that humans require such beliefs to function. Maybe we could describe choice of a universal Turing machine as such a belief for a Solomonoff inductor.
If by “ought” statements you mean the universally compelling truths of moral realism, then no, it seems straightforward to produce counterexample thinkers that would not be be compelled. As far as I can tell, the things you’re talking about don’t even set a specific course of action for the thing believing them, they have no necessary function beyond the epistemic.
There’s a third way of thinking where norms are just rules for achieving a certain kind of result optimally or at least reliably.
I think there’s some dangerous reasoning here around the idea of “why.” If I believe that a plate is on the table, I don’t need to know anything at all about my visual cortex to believe that. The explanation is not a part of the belief, nor is it inseparably attached, nor is it necessary for having the belief, it’s a human thing that we call an explanation in light of fulfilling a human desire for a story about what is being explained.
Nonetheless, your visual cortex must do certain things reliably for you to be able to perceive,
Why should they have something to do with ethics?
There’s a parallel with realism versus instrumentalism, in that both are downstream of value judgements. If you value metaphysical truth , instrumentalism is wrong-for you, because it can’t deliver it. And if you don’t value metaphysical truth, realism is wrong-for-you becae it is an unnecessary complication.
Not by algorithmic complexity. The integer consisting of a million 3s in a row is quite compressible.