Vladimir_Nesov comments on Atheism = Untheism + Antitheism - Less Wrong

86 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 01 July 2009 02:19AM

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Comment author: cousin_it 02 July 2009 09:12:47AM *  0 points [-]

Your answer strikes me as unsatisfactory: if we apply it to humans, we lose interest in electricity, atoms, quarks etc. An agent can opt to dig deeper into reality to find the base-level stuff, or it can "dissolve the question" and walk away satisfied. Why would you want to do the latter?

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 02 July 2009 10:04:41AM *  1 point [-]

The agent has preferences over these black boxes (or strategies that instantiate them), and digging deeper may be a good idea. To get rid of the (unobservable) structure in environment, the preferences for the elements of environment have to be translated in terms of preferences over the whole situations. The structure of environment becomes the structure of preferences over the black boxes.