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shminux comments on The Useful Idea of Truth - Less Wrong
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Probably because your definition of existence is no good. Try a better one.
That's an attempt to dismiss epistemic rationality by arguing that only instrumental rationality matters.
I suppose that's true by certain definitions of "matters", but it ignores those of us who do assign some utility to understanding the universe itself, and therefore at least partially incorporate the epistemic in the instrumental....
Also, if I die tomorrow of a heart attack, I think it's still meaningful to say that the rest of the planet will still exist afterwards, even though there won't exist any experimental prediction I can make and personally verify to that effect. I find solipsism rather uninteresting.
No. Please note that the terminology here is overloaded, hence it can cause confusion.
Instrumentalism, in the contex of epistemology, does not refer to instrumental rationality. It is the position that concepts are meaningful only up to the extent that they are useful to explain and predict experiences.
In the instrumentalist framework, you start with an input of sensorial experiences and possibly an output of actions (you may even consider your long-term memories as a type of sensorial experiences). You notice that your experiences show some regularities: they are correlated with each others and with your actions. Thus, put forward, test, and falsify hypotheses in order to build a model that explains these regularities and helps you to predict your next experience.
In this framework, the notion that there are entities external to yourself is just a scientific hypothesis, not an assumption.
Epistemological realism, on the other hand, assumes a priori that there are external entities which cause your experiences, they are called "Reality" or "the Truth" or "Nature" or "the Territory".
Believing that abstract concepts, such as mathematical axioms and theorems, are also external entities, is called Platonism. That's for instance, the position of Roger Penrose and, IIUC, Eliezer Yudkowsky.
The distinction between assuming a priori that there is an external world and merely hypothesizing it may appear of little importance, and indeed for most part it is possible to do science in both frameworks. However, the difference shows up in intricate issues which are far removed from intuition, such as the interpretaion of quantum mechanics:
Does the wavefunction exist? For an instrumentalist, the wavefunction exists in the same sense that the ground beneath their feet exists: they are both hypothesis useful to predict sensorial experiences. For a realist, instead, it makes sense to ponder whether the wavefunction is just in the map or also in the territory.
Epistemic rationality is a subset of instrumental rationality, to the extent that you value the truth.
-- Sark
(this allows the universe to keep existing after I die).
No, that's the statement that epistemic rationality is based on instrumental rationality.
Indeed, no good model predicts that a death of one individual result in the cessation of all experiences for everyone else. Not sure what strawman you are fighting here.
Except as a psychological phenomenon, maybe.
Okay, then I've probably misunderstood what definition you meant to give to "exist". The comment you linked talked about reliably predicting future experiences, and I'll reliably not be experiencing a universe after my death -- so doesn't that mean that the universe won't exist if I shared your definition of "exist"?
That conclusion also seemed to me to follow from your complaint about EY's definition involving photons that keep on existing after we no longer get to experience them.
Anyway, whatever confusion I have about the meaning you attempted to communicate, it was an honest one.
I don't see why. A half-decent model would not center on a single person, and the definition given does not say that "future experiences" are those of a specific person. Unless, of course, the model in question strives to describe this person's sensory experience, in which case, yes, you likely stop sensing the universe after you are gone.
You're applying TheOtherDave's definition in a manner that he himself has disavowed. He believes, for instance, that on his account the existence claims of simpler theories should be believed over the existence claims of more complex theories, even if those theories make the same experimental predictions. This would legitimize Eliezer's claim that the photon continues to exist, rather than blinking out, since it is a simpler model. See the discussion following this comment of mine.
Yes, simpler models out of several equivalent ones are preferable, no argument there. I never said otherwise, that would be silly. Here I define "simpler" instrumentally, those which require less work to make the same set of predictions. Please don't strawman me,
Sorry! Any strawmanning was unintentional. However, I'm not so sure that there was strawmanning. I meant "simpler" in terms of some appropriately rigorous version of Occam's razor. This seems different from your conception of "simpler". A simpler theory in my sense need not involve less work to make the same predictions. The standard usage of "theoretical simplicity" on LW is more in line with my conception than yours, so I have good reason to believe that this is the way TheOtherDave was using the word.
Just to make sure: do you think simpler models (in my sense) are preferable? Or do you think our two senses are in fact equivalent?
It's kind of entertaining watching this exchange interpreting my earlier comments, and I'm sort of reluctant to disturb it, but FWIW my usage of "simplicity" was reasonably well aligned with your conception, but I'm not convinced it isn't well-aligned with shminux's, as I'm not really sure what "work" refers to.
That said, if it refers to cognitive effort, I think my conception is anti-aligned with theirs, since I would (for example) expect it to be more cognitive effort to make a typical prediction starting from a smaller set of axioms than from a larger set of (mutually consistent) axioms, but would not consider the larger set simpler.
My guess is that the larger set will have some redundancy, i.e. some of the axioms would be in fact theorems. But I don't know enough about that part of math to make a definitive statement.
I agree that if it's possible, within a single logical framework F, to derive proposition P1 from proposition P2, then P1 is a theorem in F and not an axiom of F... or, at the very least, that it can be a theorem and need not be an axiom.
That said, if it's possible in F to derive some prediction P3 from either P1 or P2, it does not follow that it's possible to derive P1 from P2.
I'm yet to see a workable version of it, something that does not include computing uncomputables and such. I'd appreciate f you point me to a couple of real-life (as real as I admit to it to be, anyway) examples where a rigorous version of Occam's razor was successfully applied to differentiating between models. And no, the hand-waving about a photon and the cosmological horizon is not rigorous.
Again, a (counter)example would be useful here.
That depends on whether simpler models in your sense can result in more work to get to all the same conclusions. I am not aware of any formalization that can prove or disprove this claim.