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ahartell comments on Open thread, October 2011 - Less Wrong
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In his talk on Optimism (roughly minute 30 to roughly minute 35), David Deutsch said that the idea that the world may be inexplicable from a human perspective is wrong and is only an invitation to superstitious thinking. He even mentions an argument by Richard Dawkins stating that evolution would have no reason to produce a brain capable of comprehending everything in our universe. It reminds me of something I heard about the inability to teach algebra or whatever to dogs. He writes this argument off for reasons evolution didn't prepare me for, so I was wondering if anyone could clarify this for me. To me it seems very possible that Dawkins was right, and that without enhancement some problems are just to hard for humans.
If you can't watch the video, in one line he says that I'm having trouble with is "If we live inside a little bubble of explicability in a great inexplicable universe, then the inside couldn't be really explicable either because the outside is needed in our explanation of the inside." This seems wrong to me. In a hypothetical universe where humans were too stupid to go beyond Newtonian mechanics, we would be in a bubble that suitably explained the movement of large objects. We wouldn't need knowledge of the quantum things that would be beyond our grasp to understand why apples fall.
Am I missing something or am I misunderstanding him or is he wrong?
Deutsch essentially thinks that humans are what I think he called at one point "universal knowledge generators". I confess that I don't fully understand his argument for this claim. It seemed to be something like the idea that we can in principle run a universal Turing machine. He does apparently discuss this idea more in his book The Beginning of Infinity, but I haven't read it yet.
What would you think of a loose convention to not say one hasn't learned about a specific thing yet?
Saying that I haven't read something yet makes me more likely to think others think I am more likely to read it than if I hadn't said "yet". But that prematurely gives me some of the prestige that makes me want to read it in the first place, making it less likely I will.
(You might be thinking of http://lesswrong.com/lw/z8/image_vs_impact_can_public_commitment_be/ )
That might make sense. In this particular context, I do intend to read it eventually. But some of Deutsch's less insightful comments and the whole Popperclipping episode here has made me less inclined to do so.
Also, he seems to have the same feelings about progress and the "creation of knowledge" that young/reckless! Eliezer had about intelligence.
Without the enhancement of a computer or at least external memory like pen and paper, can you compute the n-th roots of pi to arbitrary decimal places? I can't, so it seems plain that Dawkins was correct. But it's a mighty big jump from there to "and there are processes in the universe which no constructible tools could ever let us explain, even in principle".
Humans with our enhancements haven't yet found any aspect of the universe which we have good reason to believe will always continue to escape explanation. That lack of evidence is weak evidence in favor of nothing remaining permanently and necessarily mysterious.
What would you say would actually constitute evidence for such a thing existing?
That's an easy one.
As for what would constitute strong evidence...
I can imagine encountering a living organism composed of "subtle matter" not reducible to molecular machinery, or a fundamental particle that spontaneously and stochastically changed its velocity, or an Oracle that announced the solution to the halting problem for any given piece of code.
I agree that it should all be possible with enhancement, but I'm not sure he was saying that. To your second point, I don't think dogs walk around with the knowledge that they're too stupid to comprehend the universe.