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quen_tin comments on Philosophy: A Diseased Discipline - Less Wrong
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If you are a cognitive algorithm X that receives input Y, this allows you to "know" a nontrivial fact about "reality" (whatever it is): namely, that it contains an instance of algorithm X that receives input Y. The same extends to probabilistic knowledge: if in one "possible reality" most instances of your algorithm receive input Y and in another "possible reality" most of them receive input Z, then upon seeing Y you come to believe that the former "possible reality" is more likely than the latter. This is a straightforward application of LW-style thinking, but it didn't occur to Kant as far as I know.
If I am a cognitive algorithm X that reveives input Y, I don't necessarily know what an algorithm is, what an input is, and so on. One could argue that all I know is 'Y'. I don't necessarily have any idea of what a "possible reality" is. I might not have a concept of "possibility" nor of "reality".
Your way of thinking presupposes many metaphysical concepts that have been questioned by philosophers, including Kant. I am not saying that this line of reasoning is invalid (I suspect it is a realist approach, which is a fair option). My personal feeling is that Kant is upstream of that line of reasoning.
But I do know what an algorithm is. Can someone be so Kantian as to distrust even self-contained logical reasoning, not just sensations? In that case how did they come to be a Kantian?
Do you? I find the unexamined use of this particular concept possibly the most problematic component of what you call "LW-style thinking." (Another term that commonly raises my red flags here is "pattern.")
Granted, our concepts are often unclear.The Socratic dialogs demonstrate that, when pressed, we have trouble explaining our concepts. But that doesn't mean that we don't know what things are well enough to use the concepts. People managed to communicate and survive and thrive, probably often using some of the very concepts that Socrates was able to shatter with probing questions. For example, a child's concepts of "up" and "down" unravel slightly when the child learns that the planet is a sphere, but that doesn't mean that, for everyday use, the concepts aren't just fine.
What do you find dubious about the use of this concept on LW?
To take a concrete example, the occasional attempts to delineate "real" computation as distinct from mere look-up tables seem to me rather confused and ultimately nonsensical. (Here, for example, is one such attempt, and I commented on another one here.) This strongly suggests deeper problems with the concept, or at least our present understanding of it.
Interestingly, I just searched for some old threads in which I commented on this issue, and I found this comment where you also note that presently we lack any real understanding of what constitutes an "algorithm." If you've found some insight about this in the meantime, I'd be very interested to hear it.
I don't see that the concept of a computation excludes a lookup table. A lookup table is simply one far end of a spectrum of possible ways to implement some map from inputs to outputs. And if I were writing a program that mapped inputs to outputs, implementing it as a lookup table is at least in principle always one of the options. Even a program that interacted constantly with the environment could be implemented as a lookup table, in principle. In practice, lookup tables can easily become unwieldy. Imagine a chess program implemented as a lookup table that maps each possible state of the board to a move. It would be staggeringly huge. But I don't see why we wouldn't consider it a computation.
One of your links concerns the idea that a lookup table couldn't possibly be conscious. But the topic of consciousness is a kind of mind poison, because it is tied to strong, strong delusions which corrupt everything they touch. Thinking clearly about a topic once consciousness and the self have been attached to it virtually impossible. For example, the topic of fission - of one thing splitting into two - is not a big deal as long as you're talking about ordinary things like a fork in the road, or a social club splitting into two social clubs. But if we imagine you splitting into two people (via a Star Trek transporter accident or what have you), then all of sudden it becomes very hard to think about clearly. A lot of philosophical energy has been sucked into wrapping our heads around the problem of personal identity.
Yes. In my view, this continuity is best observed through graph-theoretic properties of various finite state machines that implement the same mapping of inputs to outputs (since every computation that occurs in reality must be in the form of a finite state machine). From this perspective, the lookup table is a very sparse graph with very many nodes, but there's nothing special about it otherwise.
The reason people are concerned with the concept of consciousness, is that they have terms in their utility functions for the welfare of conscious beings.
If you have some idea how to write out a reasonable utility function without invoking consciousness I'd love to hear it. (Adjust this challenge appropriately if your ethical theory isn't consequentialist.)
I think it is largely because consciousness is so important to people that it is hard to think straight about it, and about anything tied to it. Similarly, the typical person loves Mom, and if you say bad things about Mom then they'll have a hard time thinking straight, and so it will be hard for them to dispassionately evaluate statements about Mom. But what this means is that if someone wants to think straight about something, then it's dangerous to tie it to Mom. Or to consciousness.
Nope, no new insights yet... I agree that this is a problem, or more likely some underlying confusion that we don't know how to dissolve. It's on my list of problems to think about, and I always post partial results to LW, so if something's not on my list of submitted posts, that means I've made no progress. :-(
(I know the exchange isn't primarily about Kant, but...)
Kant certainly isn't a "distrusting logical reasoning" kind of guy. He takes for granted that "analytic" (i.e. purely deductive) reasoning is possible and truth-preserving. His mission is to explain (in light of Hume's problem) how "synthetic a priori knowledge" is possible (with a secondary mission of exposing all previous work on metaphysics as nonsense). "Synthetic a priori knowledge" includes mathematics (which he doesn't regard as just a variety or application of deductive logic), our knowledge of space and time, and Newtonian science.
His solution is essentially to argue that having our sensory presentations structured in space and time, and perceiving causal relations among them, is universally necessary in order for consciousness to exist at all. Since we are conscious, we can know a priori that the necessary conditions for consciousness obtain. [Disclaimer: This quick thumbnail sketch doesn't pretend to be adequate. Neither am I convinced that the theory even makes sense.]
What Kant says we cannot know is how things ("really") are, considered independently of the universal and necessary conditions for the possibility of experience. As far as I can tell, this boils down to "it's not possible to know the answers to questions that transcend the limits of possible experience". For instance, according to Kant we cannot know whether the universe is finite or infinite, whether it has a beginning in time, whether we have free will, or whether God exists.
It's important to understand that Kant is an "empirical realist", which means that the objects of experience - the coffee cups, rocks and stars around us - really do exist and we can acquire knowledge of them and their spatiotemporal and causal relations. However, if the universe could be considered 'as it is in itself' - independently of our minds - those spatiotemporal and causal relations would disappear (rather like how co-ordinates disappear when you consider a sphere objectively).
(It's similar to the dust theory.)
The nature of logical reasoning is actually a deep philosophical question...
You know what an algorithm is, but do you know if you are an algorithm? I am not sure to understand why you need algorithm at all. Maybe your point is "If you are a human being X that receive an input Y, this allows you to know a nontrivial fact about reality (...)". I tend to agree with that formulation, but again, this supposes some concepts that do not go without saying, and in particular, it supposes a realist approach. Idealist philosophers would disagree.
I can understand that your idea is to build models of reality, then use a Bayesian approach to validate them. There is a lot to say about this (more than I could say in a few lines). For example : are you able to gather all your "inputs"? What about the qualitative aspects: can you measure them? If not, how can you ever be sure that your model is complete? Are the ideas you have about the world part of your "inputs'? How do you disentangle them from what comes from outside, how do you disentangle your feelings, memory and actual inputs? Is there a direct correspondance between your inputs and scientific data, or do you have presupositions on how to interpret the data? For example, don't you need to have an idea of what space/time is in order to measure distances and durations? Where does this idea comes from? Your brain? Reality? A bit of both? Don't we interpret any scientific data at the light of the theory itself, and isn't there a kind of circularity? etc.
This is why I talked about algorithms. When a human being says "I am a human being", you may quibble about it being "observational" or "apriori" knowledge. But algorithms can actually have apriori knowledge coded in, including knowledge of their own source code. When such an algorithm receives inputs, it can make conclusions that don't rely on "realist" or "idealist" philosophical assumptions in any way, only on coded apriori knowledge and the inputs received. And these conclusions would be correct more or less by definition, because they amount to "if reality contains an instance of algorithm X receiving input Y, then reality contains an instance of algorithm X receiving input Y".
Your second paragraph seems to be unrelated to Kant. You just point out that our reasoning is messy and complex, so it's hard to prove trustworthy from first principles. Well, we can still consider it "probably approximately correct" (to borrow a phrase from Leslie Valiant), as jimrandomh suggested. Or maybe skip the step-by-step justifications and directly check your conclusions against the real world, like evolution does. After all, you may not know everything about the internal workings of a car, but you can still drive one to the supermarket. I can relate to the idea that we're still in the "stupid driver" phase, but this doesn't imply the car itself is broken beyond repair.
I don't think relying on algorithm solves the issue, because you still need someone to implement and interpret the algorithm.
I agree with your second point: you can take a pragmatist approach. Actually, that's a bit how science work. But still you did not prove in anyway that your model is a complete and definitive description of all there is nor that it can be strictly identifiable with "reality", and Kant's argument remains valid. It would be more correct to say that a scientific model is a relational model (it describes the relations between things as they appear to observers and their regularities).
You can be the algorithm. The software running in your brain might be "approximately correct by design", a naturally arising approximation to the kind of algorithms I described in previous comments. I cannot examine its workings in detail, but sometimes it seems to obtain correct results and "move in harmony with Bayes" as Eliezer puts it, so it can't be all wrong.
All of those questions have known answers, but you have to take them on one at a time. Most of them go away when you switch from discrete (boolean) reasoning to continuous (probabilistic) reasoning.
I don't think that Kant makes the distinction between "knowing" and "having information about" that you and I would make. If he doesn't outright deny that we have any information about the world beyond our senses, he certainly comes awfully close.
On A380, Kant writes,
And, on A703/B731, he writes,
(Emphasis added. These are from the Guyer–Wood translation.)
Does anyone smell irony in this whole discussion? Considering the OP specifically derided the whole "discussion of old, dead guys" thing?
Ah, I wish this wasn't a three year old post. I have no idea how this site works yet, so who knows whose attention I'll attract by doing this?
At least the person whose comment you're replying to sees your reply, so you weren't speaking entirely into the void :).
Ok, it depends what you mean by "information about". My understanding is that we have no information on the nature of reality, which does not mean that we have no information from reality.
Suggestion: knowledge of what a thing is in itself , is like information that is not coded in any particular scheme.
I suppose it's a virtue of that interpretation that 'information that cannot be coded in any particular scheme' is a conceptual impossibility (assuming that's what you meant).
Yes. You can make such an interpretation of the ding-an-such.
For my money, that lessens its impact.
I agree that we get information from reality. And I think that we agree that our confidence that we get information from reality is far less murky than our concept of "the nature of reality".
Kant, being a product of his times, doesn't seem to think this way, though. Maybe, if you explained the modern information-theoretic notion of "information" to Kant, he would agree that we get information about external reality in that sense. But I don't know. It's hard to imagine what a thinker like Kant would do in an entirely different intellectual environment from the one in which he produced his work. I'm inclined to think that, for Kant, the noumena are something to which it is not even possible to apply the concept of "having information about".