shminux comments on The Useful Idea of Truth - Less Wrong

77 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 October 2012 06:16PM

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Comment author: [deleted] 02 October 2012 04:19:31PM 2 points [-]

Suppose I have two different non-meaningful statements, A and B. Is it possible to tell them apart? On what basis? On what basis could we recognize non-meaningful statements as tokens of language at all?

Comment author: shminux 02 October 2012 05:15:01PM 1 point [-]

Is it possible to tell them apart?

Why would you want to?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 October 2012 05:33:49PM 1 point [-]

See this.

Comment author: shminux 02 October 2012 06:09:33PM 0 points [-]

Not sure how this is relevant, feel free to elaborate.

Comment author: Peterdjones 02 October 2012 08:10:39PM 0 points [-]

What an odd thing to say. I can tell the difference between untestable sentences, and that's all I need to refute the LP verification principle. Stipulating a defintion of "meaning" that goes beyond linguistic tractability doens't solve anything , and stipulating that people shouldn't want to understand sentences about invisible gorillas doens't either.

Comment author: shminux 02 October 2012 08:32:57PM 2 points [-]

invisible gorillas

Seems like we are not on the same page re the definition of meaningful. I expect "invisible gorillas" to be a perfectly meaningful term in some contexts.

Comment author: Peterdjones 02 October 2012 08:34:41PM 1 point [-]

I don't follow that, because it is not clear whether you are using the vanilla, linguistic notion of "meaning" or the stipulated LPish version,

Comment author: shminux 02 October 2012 09:24:53PM *  0 points [-]

I am not a philosopher and not a linguist, to me meaning of a word or a sentence is the information that can be extracted from it by the recipient, which can be a person or a group of people, or a computer, maybe even an AI. Thus it is not something absolute. I suppose it is closest to an internal interpretation. What is your definition?

Comment author: Peterdjones 03 October 2012 09:18:16AM 1 point [-]

I am specifically trying not to put forward an idiosyncratic definition.