whpearson comments on What Program Are You? - Less Wrong

28 Post author: RobinHanson 12 October 2009 12:29AM

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Comment author: Tyrrell_McAllister 12 October 2009 03:13:56AM 2 points [-]

Isn't this like criticizing Bayesianism because it doesn't tell you how to select your initial prior? For practical purposes, that doesn't matter because you already have a prior; and once you have a prior, Bayesianism is enough to go on from there.

Similarly, you already decompose at least some part of yourself into program and data (don't you?). This is enough for that part of yourself to work with these decision theories. And using them, you can proceed to decide how to decompose the rest of yourself, or even to reflect on the original decomposition and choose a new one.

Comment author: whpearson 12 October 2009 09:57:02AM 6 points [-]

The following is slightly tongue in cheek, but I don't normally place a stable boundary between program and data on myself, I revise it depending on purpose. The following is one view I find useful sometimes

Nope, I'm all program. What you would call data is just programming in weaker languages than Turing complete ones. I can rewrite my programming, do meta analysis on it.

The information streaming into my eyes is a program that I don't know what it will make me do, it could make me flinch or it change the conceptual way that I see the world. The visual system is just an interpreter for the programming optical signals.