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hen comments on Self-Congratulatory Rationalism - Less Wrong
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You're not being imaginative enough: you're thinking about someone with almost all true beliefs (including true beliefs about what Christians tend to say), and a couple of sort of stand out false beliefs about how the universe works as a whole. I want you to imagine talking to someone with mostly false beliefs about the subject at hand. So you can't assume that by 'Jesus' self-sacrifice washes away the original sin' that they're talking about anything you know anything about because you can't assume they are connecting with any theology you've ever heard of. Or even that they're talking about theology. Or even objects or events in any sense you're familiar with.
I think, again, delusional people are remarkable for having some unaccountably false beliefs, not for having mostly false beliefs. People with mostly false beliefs, I think, wouldn't be recognizable even as being conscious or aware of their surroundings (because they're not!).
So why are we talking about them, then?
Well, my point is that as a matter of course, you assume everyone you talk to has mostly true beliefs, and for the most part thinks rationally. We're talking about 'people' with mostly or all false beliefs just to show that we don't have any experience with such creatures.
Bigger picture: the principle of charity, that is the assumption that whoever you are talking to is mostly right and mostly rational, isn't something you ought to hold, it's something you have no choice but to hold. The principle of charity is a precondition on understanding anyone at all, even recognizing that they have a mind.
People will have mostly true beliefs, but they might not have true beliefs in the areas under concern. For obvious reasons, people's irrationality is likely to be disproportionately present in the beliefs with which they disagree with others. So the fact that you need to be charitable in assuming people have mostly true beliefs may not be practically useful--I'm sure a creationist rationally thinks water is wet, but if I'm arguing with him, that subject probably won't come up as much as creationism.
That's true, but I feel like a classic LW point can be made here: suppose it turns out some people can do magic. That might seem like a big change, but in fact magic will then just be subject to the same empirical investigation as everything else, and ultimately the same integration into physical theory the same as everything else.
So while I agree with you that when we specify a topic, we can have broader disagreement, that disagreement is built on and made possible by very general agreement about everything else. Beliefs are holistic, not atomic, and we can't partition them off while making any sense of them. We're never just talking about some specific subject matter, but rather emphasizing some subject matter on the background of all our other beliefs (most of which must be true).
The thought, in short, is that beliefs are of a nature to be true, in the way dogs naturally have four legs. Some don't, because something went wrong, but we can only understand the defect in these by having the basic nature of beliefs, namely truth, in the background.
That could be true but doesn't have to be true. Our ontological assumptions might also turn out to be mistaken.
To quote Eliezer:
True, and a discovery like that might require us to make some pretty fundamental changes. But I don't think Morpheus could be right about the universe's relation to math. No universe, I take it, 'runs' on math in anything but the loosest figurative sense. The universe we live in is subject to mathematical analysis, and what reason could we have for thinking any universe could fail to be so? I can't say for certain, of course, that every possible universe must run on math, but I feel safe in claiming that we've never imagined a universe, in fiction or through something like religion, which would fail to run on math.
More broadly speaking, anything that is going to be knowable at all is going to be rational and subject to rational understanding. Even if someone has some very false beliefs, their beliefs are false not just jibber-jabber (and if they are just jibber-jabber then you're not talking to a person). Even false beliefs are going to have a rational structure.
That is a fact about you, not a fact about the universe. Nobody could imagine light being both a particle and a wave, for example, until their study of nature forced them to.
People could imagine such a thing before studying nature showed they needed to; they just didn't. I think there's a difference between a concept that people only don't imagine, and a concept that people can't imagine. The latter may mean that the concept is incoherent or has an intrinsic flaw, which the former doesn't.
In the interest of not having this discussion degenerate into an argument about what "could" means, I would like to point out that your and hen's only evidence that you couldn't imagine a world that doesn't run on math is that you haven't.
Absolutely, it's a fact about me, that's my point. I just also think it's a necessary fact.
What's your evidence for this? Keep in mind that the history of science is full of people asserting that X has to be the case because they couldn't imagine the world being otherwise, only for subsequent discoveries to show that X is not in fact the case.
I don't know what you mean by "run on math". Do qualia run in math?
It's not my phrase, and I don't particularly like it myself. If you're asking whether or not qualia are quanta, then I guess the answer is no, but in the sense that the measured is not the measure. It's a triviality that I can ask you how much pain you feel on a scale of 1-10, and get back a useful answer. I can't get at what the experience of pain itself is with a number or whatever, but then, I can't get at what the reality of a block of wood is with a ruler either.
Then by imagining an all qualia universe, I can easily imagine a universe that doesn't run on math, for some values of an"runs on math"
The idea of rational understanding rests on the fact that you are separated from the object that you are trying to understand and the object itself doesn't change if you change your understanding of it.
Then there the halting problem. There are a variety of problems that are NP. Those problems can't be understood by doing a few experiments and then extrapolating general rules from your experiments. I'm not quite firm with the mathematical terminology but I think NP problems are not subject to thinks like calculus that are covered in what Wikipedia describes as Mathematical analysis.
Heinz von Förster makes the point that children have to be taught that "green" is no valid answer for the question: "What's 2+2?". I personally like his German book titled: "Truth is the invention of a liar". Heinz von Förster headed the started the Biological Computer Laboratory in 1958 and came up with concepts like second-order cybernetics.
As far as fictional worlds go, Terry Pratchetts discworld runs on narrativium instead of math.
That's true as long there no revelations of truth by Gods or other magical processes. In an universe where you can get the truth through magical tarot reading that assumption is false.
That's not obvious to me. Why do you think this?
I also don't understand this inference. Why do you think revelations of truth by Gods or other magical processes, or tarot readings, mean that such a universe would a) be knowable, and b) not be subject to rational analysis?
It might depend a bit of what you mean with rationality. You lose objectivity.
Let's say I'm hypnotize someone. I'm in a deep state of rapport. That means my emotional state matters a great deal. If I label something that the person I'm talking to as unsuccessful, anxiety raises in myself. That anxiety will screw with the result I want to achieve. I'm better of if I blank my mind instead of engaging in rational analysis of what I'm doing.
Logically A -> B is not the same thing as B -> A.
I said that it's possible for there to be knowledge that you can only get through a process besides rational analysis if you allow "magic".
That depends on your definition of "math".
For example, consider a simulated world where you control the code. Can you make it so that 2+2 in that simulation is sometimes 4, sometimes 15, and sometimes green? I don't see why not.
I think you're conflating the physical operation that we correlate with addition and the mathematical structure. 'Green' I'm not seeing, but I could write a computer program modeling a universe in which placing a pair of stones in a container that previously held a pair of stones does not always lead to that container holding a quadruplet of stones. In such a universe, the mathematical structure we call 'addition' would not be useful, but that doesn't say that the formalized reasoning structure we call 'math' would not exist, or could not be employed.
(In fact, if it's a computer program, it is obvious that its nature is susceptible to mathematical analysis.)
Is "containing mathematical truth" the same as "running on math"?
I guess I could make it appear that way, sure, though I don't know if I could then recognize anything in my simulation as thinking or doing math. But in any case, that's not a universe in which 2+2=green, it's a universe in which it appears to. Maybe I'm just not being imaginative enough, and so you may need to help me flesh out the hypothetical.
If I write the simulation in python I can simple define my function for addition:
Unfortunately I don't know how to format the indention perfectly for this forum.
Math is what happens when you take your original working predictive toolkit (like counting sheep) and let it run on human wetware disconnected from its original goal of having to predict observables. Thus some form of math would arise in any somewhat-predictable universe evolving a calculational substrate.