wedrifid comments on Compartmentalization as a passive phenomenon - Less Wrong

44 Post author: Kaj_Sotala 26 March 2010 01:51PM

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Comment author: CronoDAS 26 March 2010 07:46:47PM 18 points [-]

GEB has a section on this.

In order to not compartmentalize, you need to test if your beliefs are all consistent with each other. If your beliefs are all statements in propositional logic, consistency checking becomes the Boolean Satisfiability Problem, which is NP-complete. If your beliefs are statements in predicate logic, then consistency checking becomes PSPACE-complete, which is even worse than NP-complete.

Not compartmentalizing isn't just difficult, it's basically impossible.

Comment author: wedrifid 27 March 2010 03:34:40AM 2 points [-]

It took me several seconds to guess that GEB refers to Godel, Escher, Bach.

Comment author: CronoDAS 27 March 2010 05:14:09AM 0 points [-]

Sorry about that!