Vladimir_Nesov comments on A Master-Slave Model of Human Preferences - Less Wrong

58 Post author: Wei_Dai 29 December 2009 01:02AM

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Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 29 December 2009 07:34:19AM 2 points [-]

Given the physical ontology we have, the ascription of preferences to a physical system is always a matter of interpretation or imputation, just as is the ascription of semantic or representational content to its states.

But to what extent does the result depend on the initial "seed" of interpretation? Maybe, very little. For example, prediction of behavior of a given physical system strictly speaking rests on the problem of induction, but that doesn't exactly say that anything goes or that what will actually happen is to any reasonable extent ambiguous.