Vaniver comments on Tapestries of Gold - Less Wrong
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Comments (27)
Overall, I liked this post. Here's the primary exception:
The compression could easily be lossy. Most higher level concepts are relational in some way- to use an example from image processing, we could build cats out of noses out of edges out of pixels. If we have an idea of how a cat acts on the level of catness, that does not necessarily give us all we need to figure out the components of a cat, or how those components appear visually, or what the basics of the visual field are. If we know pixels, it is easy to come up with edges; if we know edges, it may not be clear if there are pixels or if the underlying image is continuous, for example. More mathematically, if I know the difference of two variables, that does not imply that I can determine what those original variables were.
And typically, when a human makes these sorts of maps, they do so in a reductive (i.e. lossy) way. I mean that in the sense that a molecule is a single element in the chemistry map, but many elements in the physics map; a hand is a handful of elements in the physiology map, but a staggeringly massive number of elements in the chemistry map.
If you were given the complete story of some hunter-gatherer tribe on the moral level- what they did, what they thought about each other, what values they held, and so on- do you think that from just this account a superintelligence could determine the fundamental nature of the particles in their universe? That just seems information-theoretically implausible.