JoshuaZ comments on No coinductive datatype of integers - Less Wrong

4 Post author: cousin_it 04 May 2011 04:37PM

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Comment author: JoshuaZ 05 May 2011 02:48:22AM 2 points [-]

Can I attempt a translation/expansion for Sewing-Machine of why you disagree with the last sentence?

It seems that there's an intuition among humans that the Ramsey result is true, in the sense that PA + PH captures our intuition of the integers more closely than PA + ~PH given the second order result. What you want is a computer to be able to make that sort of intuitive reasoning or to make it more precise. Is that more or less the point?

Comment author: [deleted] 05 May 2011 04:09:42AM 4 points [-]

We can all agree that human intuition is grand but not magical, I hope? Here is my point of view: you are having difficulty teaching a computer to "make that sort of intuitive reasoning" because that sort of reasoning is not quite right.

"That sort of reasoning" is a good heuristic for discovering true facts about the world (for instance, discovering interesting sequences of symbols that constitute a formal proof of the Paris-Harrington theorem), and to that extent it surely can be taught to a computer. But it does not itself express a true fact about the world, and because of that you are limited in your ability to make it part of the premises on which a computer operates (such as the limitation discussed in the OP).

So I've been thinking lately, anyway.

Comment author: Sniffnoy 05 May 2011 03:03:19AM 1 point [-]

I'm really at a loss as to why such a thing should be intuitive. The additional condition seems to me to be highly unnatural; Ramsey's theorem is a purely graph-theoretic result, and this strengthened version involves comparing the number of vertices used to numbers that the vertices happen to correspond to, a comparison we would ordinarily consider meaningless.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 05 May 2011 03:14:00AM *  0 points [-]

If I'm following cousin it, the idea doesn't have anything really to do with the statement about Ramsey numbers. As I understand it, if in some system that is only slightly stronger than PA we can show some statement S of the form A x in N, P(x), then we should believe that the correct models of PA are those which have S being true. Or to put it a different way, we should think PA + S will do a better job telling us about reality than PA + ~S would. I'm not sure this can be formalized beyond that. Presumably if it he had a way to formalize this, cousin it wouldn't have an issue with it.