byrnema comments on Open Thread: November 2009 - Less Wrong

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Comment author: byrnema 07 November 2009 06:52:39PM *  3 points [-]

No amount of detail regarding how the crow caws is going to get at why it does

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'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.

Why is this the privileged "real explanation"?

Exactly. At least, we may agree that the crow did caw.

Comment author: loqi 08 November 2009 09:37:57PM 0 points [-]

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.

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.

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.

I have yet to be convinced that a Bayesian superintelligence couldn't infer the existence of fly-like organisms from a horse's DNA.

Comment author: byrnema 09 November 2009 04:19:12AM *  0 points [-]

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.

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:

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.

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.

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