= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
cousin_it comments on Taking Ideas Seriously - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (257)
For what it's worth, I have a strong injunction against taking ideas seriously. I always seem to want better proofs than are available. This doesn't look like a double standard from inside: I disbelieve in the Singularity only slightly more than I disbelieve in space elevators and fusion power in the near future.
I wonder why you take Tegmark's multiverse seriously. It seems to be the odd one out on your list, an obviously wrong idea. Have they found a workaround for the problem of teacups turning into pheasants?
I'm surprised that you weren't aware that I took Tegmark's multiverse seriously, since I mentioned it in the UDT post. It was one of the main inspirations for me coming up with UDT. You can see here a 2006 proto-UDT that's perhaps more clearly based on Tegmark's idea.
Well, UDT is sort of my answer to that. In UDT you can no longer say "I assign a small probability for observing this teacup turning into a pheasant" but you can still say "I'm willing to bet a large amount of money that this teacup won't turn into a pheasant." See also What are probabilities, anyway? I'm not sure if that answers your question, so let me know.
(You might also be interested in UDASSA, which was an earlier attempt to solve the same problem.)
This sounds circular to me. Why are you willing to bet a large amount of money that this teacup won't turn into a pheasant? Why do we happen to have a "preference" for a highly ordered world?
One approach to answering that question is the one I gave here. Another possibility is that there is something like "objective morality" going on. Another one is that our preferences are simply arbitrary and there is no further explanation.
So I think this is still an open question, but there's probably an answer one way or another, and the fact that we don't know what the right answer is yet shouldn't count against Tegmark's idea. Furthermore, I think denying Tegmark's idea only leads to more serious problems, like why does one universe "exist" and not another, and how do we know that one universe exists and not two or three?
There may be a grain of truth in this kind of theory, but I cannot see it clearly yet. How exactly do you separate statements about the mind ("probability as preference") from statements about the world? What about bunnies, for example? Bunnies aren't very smart, but their bodies seem evolved to make some outcomes more probable than others, in perfect accord with our idea of probability. The same applies to plants, that have no brains at all. Did evolution decide very early on that all life should use our particular "random" concept of preference? (How is it encoded in living organisms, then?) Or do you have some other mechanism in mind?
The shared traits come from shared evolution, that operates in the context of our physics and measure of expected outcomes. The concept of expectation implies evolution (given some other conditions), and evolution in its turn makes organisms that respect the concept of expectation (that is, persist within evolution, get selected).
If you believe in "measure of expected outcomes", there's no problem. Wei was trying to dissolve that belief and replace it with preference encoded in programs, or something. What do you think about this now?
To make it more pithy: are there, somewhere in the configuration space of our universe, evolved pointy-eared humanoids that can solve NP-complete problems quickly because they don't respect the Born probabilities? Are they immune to "spontaneous existence failure", from their own point of view?
What do you mean by "believe"? To refer to the concept of evolution (as explanation for plants and bunnies), you have to refer to the world, and not just the world, but the world equipped with measure (quantum mechanical measure, say). Without that measure, evolution doesn't work, and the world won't behave as we expect it to behave. After that is understood, it's not surprising that evolution selected organisms that respect that measure and not something else.
So, I'm not assuming measure additionally, the argument is that measure is implicit in your very question.
The NP-solving creatures won't be in our universe in the sense that they don't exist in the context of our universe with its measure. When you refer to our universe, you necessarily reference measure as part. It's like a fundamental law, a necessary part of specification of what you are talking about.
Um, no. I don't know of any fundamental dynamical laws in QM that use measure. You can calculate the evolution of the wavefunction without mentioning measure at all. It only appears when we try to make probabilistic predictions about our subjective experience. You could equip the same big evolving wavefunction with a different measure, and get superintelligent elves. Or no?
Yes, but then you won't be talking about our world in the usual sense, because, say, classical world won't work as expected anymore given those laws (measure). If you don't include measure, you don't get any predictions about what you expect to see in reality, while that's what physics is normally all about.
Evolution happened in that ordered world, and it built systems that are expected (and hence, expect) to work in the ordered world, because working in ordered world was the criterion for selecting them in that ordered world in the past. In order to survive/replicate in an ordered world (narrow subset of what's possible), it's adaptive to expect ordered world.
...which seems to be roughly the same "reality is a Darwinian concept" nonsense as what I came up with (do you agree?). You can still assign probabilities though, but they are no longer decision-theoretic probabilities.