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lessdazed comments on A Rationalist's Tale - Less Wrong
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Theism without computationalism? It's not popular, but most Less Wrong folk are computationalists AFAIK. Hence the "timeless decision theory" and "Tegmark" and "simulation argument" memes floating around. I don't see how a computationalist can ignore theism on the grounds that it claims that abstract things exist.
I do not think Plato's forms are equivalent to computationalism.
Modern platonism is just the view that abstract objects exist.
Do they causally do anything?
Of course not.
What? Of course abstract objects have causal influence... why do you think people don't think they do?
Because I've studied metaphysics? It's not even a quirky feature of abstract objects it's often how they are defined. Now that distinction may be merely an indexical one-- the physical universe could be an abstraction in some other physical universe and we just call ours 'concrete' because we're in it. But the distinction is still true.
If you can give an instance of an abstract object exerting causal influence that would be big news in metaphysics.
(Note that an abstract object exerting causal influence is not the same as tokens of that abstraction exerting causal influence due features that the token possesses in virtue of being a token of that abstract object. That is "Bayes Theorem caused me to realize a lot of my beliefs were wrong" is referring to the copy of Bayes Theorem in your brain, not the Platonic entity. There are also type-causal statements like "Smoking causes cancer" but these are not claims of abstract objects having causal influence just abstractions on individual, token instances of causality. None of this, or my assent to lessdazed question, reflects a disparaging attitude toward abstract objects. You can't talk about the world without them. They're just not what causes are made of.)
Okay, thanks; right after commenting I realized I'd almost certainly mixed up my quotation and referent. (Such things often happen to a computationalist.)
ETA: A few days ago I got the definition of moral cognitivism completely wrong too... maybe some of my neurons are dying. :/
Metaphysics of abstract processes: Pythagoras -> Leibniz -> Turing. Platonism -> monadology -> algorithmic information theory.
Math and logics: Archimedes et al -> Leibniz -> Turing. Logic -> symbolic logic -> theory of computation.
Philosophy of cognition: (haven't researched yet) -> Leibniz -> Turing. ? -> alphabet of thought -> Church-Turing thesis.
Computer engineering: Archimedes -> Pascal-Leibniz -> Turing. Antikythera mechanism -> symbolic calculator -> computer.
I think you're vastly over emphasizing the historic importance of Leibniz.
True, but I think only in the same sense that everyone vastly overemphasizes the importance of Babbage. They both made cool theoretical advances that didn't have much of an effect on later thinking. This gives a sort of distorted view of cause and effect but the counterfactual worlds are actually worth figuring in to your tale in this case. Wow that would take too long to write out clearly, but maybe it kinda makes sense. (Chaitin actually discovered Leibniz after he developed his brand of algorithmic information theory; but he was like 'ah, this guy knew where it was at' when he found out about him.)
OTOH, Wiener already in 1948 explicitly saw the digital computer as the fulfilment of Leibniz's calculus ratiocinator. (Quoted on Wiki here, full text (maybe paywalled) here.)
Interesting! You have a cite?
This is the original essay I read, I think: http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/chaitin.htm
It'll take a few minutes, Googling Leibniz+Chaitin gives a lot of plausible hits.
(The history of how the idea of computation got formulated is really pertinent for FAI researchers. Justification is a lot like computation. I think we're nearing the "Leibniz stage" of technical moral philosophy. Luckily we already have the language of computation (and decision theory) to build off of in order to talk about justification. Hopefully that will reduce R&D time from centuries to decades. I'm kind of hopeful.)