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JohnSidles comments on Quotes and Notes on Scott Aaronson’s "The Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine" - Less Wrong
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As y'all know, I agree with Hume (by way of Jaynes) that the error of projecting internal states of the mind onto the external world is an incredibly common and fundamental hazard of philosophy.
Probability is in the mind to start with; if I think that 103,993 has a 20% of being prime (I haven't tried it, but Prime Number Theorem plus it being not divisible by 2, 3, or 5 wild ballpark estimate) then this uncertainty is a fact about my state of mind, not a fact about the number 103,993. Even if there are many-worlds whose frequencies correspond to some uncertainties, that itself is just a fact; probability is in the map, not in the territory.
Then we have Knightian uncertainty, which is how I feel when I try to estimate AI timelines, i.e., when I query my brain on different occasions it returns different probability estimates, and I know there are going to be some effects which aren't on my causal map. This is a kind of doubly-subjective double-uncertainty. Of course you still have to turn it into betting odds on pain of violating von Neumann-Morgenstern; see also the Ellsberg paradox of inconsistent decision-making if ambiguity is given a special behavior.
Taking this doubly-map-level property of Knightian uncertainty (a sort of confusion about probabilities) and trying to reify it in the territory as a kind of stuff (encoded in hidden interstices of QM) which somehow plays an irreplaceable functional role in cognition is...
...probably not going to be the best-received philosophical speculation ever posted to LW. I mean, as a species we should know by now that this kind of idea just basically never turns out to be correct. If X is confusing and Y is confusing this does not make X a good explanation for Y when X makes no new experimental predictions about Y even in retrospect, thou shalt not answer confusing questions by postulating new mysterious opaque substances, etc.
The entanglement(s) of hot-noisy-evolved biological cognition with abstract ideals of cognition that Eliezer Yudkowsky vividly describes in Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, and the quantum entanglement(s) of dynamical flow with the physical processes of cognition that Scott Aaronson vividly describes in Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine, both find further mathematical/social/philosophical echoes in Joshua Landsberg's Tensors: Geometry and Applications (2012), specifically in Landsberg's thought-provoking introductory section Section 0.3: Clash of Cultures (this introduction is available as PDF on-line).
E.g., the above discussions above relating to "map versus object" distinctions can be summarized by:
as contrasted with the opposing assertion
As Landsberg remarks
The Yudkowsky/Aaronson philosophical divide is vividly mirrored in the various divides that Landsberg describes between geometers and algebraists, and mathematicians and engineers.
Question Has it happened before, that philosophical conundrums have arisen in the course of STEM investigation, then been largely or even entirely resolved by further STEM progress?
Answer Yes of course (beginning for example with Isaac Newton's obvious-yet-wrong notion that "absolute, true and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature flows equably without regard to anything external").
Conclusion It may be that, in coming decades, the philosophical debate(s) between Yudkowsky and Aaronson will be largely or even entirely resolved by mathematical discourse following the roadmap laid down by Landsberg's outstanding text.
An elaboration of the above argument now appears on Shtetl Optimized, essentially as a meditation on the question: What strictly mathematical proposition would comprise rationally convincing evidence that the key linear-quantum postulates of "One Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine* amount to “an unredeemed claim [that has] become a roadblock rather than an inspiration” (to borrow an apt phrase from Jaffe and Quinn's arXiv:math/9307227).
Readers of Not Even Wrong seeking further (strictly mathematical) mathematical illumination in regard to these issues may wish to consult Arnold Neumaier and Dennis Westra's textbook-in-progress Classical and Quantum Mechanics via Lie Algebras (arXiv:0810.1019, 2011), whose Introduction states:
That the Neumaier/Westra textbook is an unfinished work-in-progress constitutes proof prima facie that the final tractatus upon these much-discussed logico-physico-philosophicus issues has yet to be written! :)