Peterdjones 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: Peterdjones 03 October 2012 09:45:44AM 1 point [-]

When we talk "meaninful" or "not meaningful" we are really talking physics or not physics.

Says who? Even if your multiversal theory is right, that doens't follow. Physics doens't prove anything about the meaning of the word "meaning".

Comment author: [deleted] 03 October 2012 06:19:12PM -1 points [-]

Would a powerful AI, from the "run_ai<enter>" is pressed on the command line till it knows practically everything ever give a significant probability to violation of conservation of energy?

Humans are really amazingly bad at thinking about physics, (Aristotle is a notable example, he practically formalized intuitive physics which are dead wrong,) but what if you aren't?

I am nearly certain there exists some multiverse branch where humans study the avian migration patterns of the wild hog, but I too am nearly certain there is no multiverse branch within this mutiversal causal closure where even one electron spontaneously appears out of nothing and then goes on its merry way.

I agree this is a different viewpoint than a purely epistemological one, and that any epistemological agent can only approximate the function (defun exists-in-mutiverse-p...), but if you want be stringent, physics is the way.

Furthemore it patternmaches against my concept of how Tegmark invented his eponymous hypotheses: finding a basic premise and wondering if it is neccesary. Do we really need brains to talk about meaningful hypotheses, or do we just need a big universe.

Comment author: Peterdjones 03 October 2012 07:02:32PM 0 points [-]

I don't see how that addresses my comment. A sentence is meaningful or not because of the laws of language, not the laws of physics.