Manfred comments on Bayes Slays Goodman's Grue - Less Wrong

0 Post author: potato 17 November 2011 10:45AM

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Comment author: Manfred 17 November 2011 04:42:14AM *  4 points [-]

Fortunately, the reason this helps is deeper than counting the number of hertz. When you want to determine the complexity of a term, you have to specify what language to use to write the term. The reason grue seems complicated to us evolved animals is because it has higher complexity in the language of our observations - the language of what neurons we feel light up when we look at the rock.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 17 November 2011 04:51:15AM 2 points [-]

So does that mean that if an entity had a neuronal structure that intuited grue and bleen it would be justified in treating the hypothesis that way? I'd be willing to bite that bullet I think.

Comment author: moshez 17 November 2011 06:14:42PM 4 points [-]

It means that that entity's evolved instincts would be out-of-whack with the MML, so if that entity also got to the point where it invented Turing machines, it would see the flaw in its reasoning. This is no different than realizing that Maxwell's equations, though they look more complicated than "anger" to a human, are actually simpler. Sometimes, the intuition is wrong. In the blue/grue case, human intuition happens to not be wrong, but a hypothetical entity is -- and both humans and the entity, after understanding math and computer science, would agree that humans are wrong about anger, and hypothetical entities are wrong about grue. Why is that a problem?