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loqi comments on Open Thread: November 2009 - Less Wrong
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Why is this the privileged "real explanation"? For example, the real explanation is that evolution produces complex social assemblies in need of signaling mechanisms. Or the real explanation is that an asteroid or comet disrupted the previous biological configuration, allowing crow-like birds to evolve. Etc...
We don't expect that reductionist approaches have the magical potential to successfully answer all possible questions. It's possible (and necessary) for information to be irretrievably lost. So how it's supposed to work is actually straight-forward: seek evidence that distinguishes between different causal hypotheses for the crow's caw.
Depending on what you're looking for, there may be no meaningful explanation, as in the case of chaotic systems. For example, the most concise explanation for a particular cloud being of a particular shape may just be the entire mountain of data comprising the positions and velocities of the air and water particles involved.
I think this is an overstatement. The only hard upper bound we have on how much information might be contained in a crow's vocal system is the number of possible states in the physical system comprising it, which is huge. It even seems conceivable that significant portions of a crow's DNA might be reconstructible from a detailed enough understanding of its vocal system.
I'd say the mechanical crow caws because it was built that way. Then you're faced with the question of how something can possibly be built for no reason.
But "this type of information" is stated in terms of physically observable phenomena. We can reason logically and mathematically about the things we observe without new physics, as long as the observations themselves have believable reductions to known physics. I don't see what you're looking for that isn't captured by a reductionist model of the crows, their communication mechanisms, their brains, and their evolutionary history.
I'm certain there is not enough information in how the crow caws. For example, there is not enough information even in the DNA; if the base pairs could be deduced from it's caw (which I would guess is impossible), because the full explanation will involve it's environment and the other crows. (For example, if you cloned a horse in a sterile laboratory, you wouldn't know why it swished it's tail without also cloning a fly.)
We know there is enough information in the whole universe. The crow, its environment and its entire evolution history do explain everything about it.
So our different answers to the 'why' a crow caws are different ways and angles of summarixing the limited story that we know about the whole universe. I agree with Jack that it would be useful to have a 'good' classification of these answers. However, it's not a project I would be interested in following, generally, because the quality of the outcome is too subjective. I would enjoy reading the classification of someone who thought the way I did, and would find it frustrating to read that of someone who thought differently, with no tools to distinguish 'quality' beyond this feeling of accord or frustration.
Exactly. At least, we may agree that the crow did caw.
I'd agree that there probably isn't enough information, but I think your certainty is misplaced. I'm guessing the crow's DNA contains quite a lot of information about its environment and social habits.
I have yet to be convinced that a Bayesian superintelligence couldn't infer the existence of fly-like organisms from a horse's DNA.
Actually, it seems we agree. I'd agree that there could be enough information in the horse DNA to deduce many salient features about the fly. In fact, I might even put a higher probability on the information being in there somewhere than you would. But I thought we were trying to determine where such information is coded ... in other words, how large a swathe of information would you need to guarantee that you have enough?
But I see the conversation has drifted over time.
What I was saying at the beginning, which I believe you disagreed with, was that the answer was mathematical in some way (algebraic, actually, because my favored answer to the 'why' was about relationships among the crows rather than about the materials the crow is made of) while you were pressing it should still be answered in the physicality of the universe:
So by now I've now changed my view. I agree with you that all the answers do ultimately lie in the materials: the crows and their material environment. At the time of my first post, I had preferred to answer that the crow had a "purpose" (to speak with other crows) but of course this is a story which would actually reduce to a bunch of statistics over time that crows had better fitness when they communicated in effective ways.