ialdabaoth comments on Infinite Certainty - Less Wrong

32 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 09 January 2008 06:49AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (114)

Sort By: Old

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: OccamsTaser 28 June 2013 07:29:39PM 2 points [-]

So by that logic I should assign a nonzero probability to ¬(A→A). And if something has nonzero probability, you should bet on it if the payout is sufficiently high. Would you bet any amount of money or utilons at any odds on this proposition? If not, then I don't believe you truly believe 100% certainty is impossible. Also, 100% certainty can't be impossible, because impossibility implies that it is 0% likely, which would be a self-defeating argument. You may find it highly improbable that I can truly be 100% certain. What probability do you assign to me being able to assign 100% probability?

Comment author: ialdabaoth 28 June 2013 08:14:52PM *  0 points [-]

A lot of this is a framing problem. Remember that anything we're discussing here is in human terms, not (for example) raw Universal Turing Machine tape-streams with measurable Komolgorov complexities. So when you say "what probability do you assign to me being able to assign 100% probability", you're abstracting a LOT of little details that otherwise need to be accounted for.

I.e., if I'm computing probabilities as a set of propositions, each of which is a computable function that might predict the universe and a probability that I assign to whether it accurately does so, and in all of those computable functions my semantic representation of 'probability' is encoded as log odds with finite precision, then your question translates into a function which traverses all of my possible worlds, looks to see if one of those probabilities that refers to your self-assigned probability is encoded as the number 'INFINITY', multiplies that by the probability that I assigned that world being the correct one, and then tabulates.

Since "encoded as log odds with finite precision" and "encoded as the number 'INFINITY'" are not simultaneously possible given certain encoding schemes, this really resolves itself to "do I encode floating-point numbers using a mantissa notation or other scheme that allows for values like +INF/-INF/+NaN/-NaN?"

Which sounds NOTHING like the question you asked, but it the answers do happen to perfectly correlate (to within the precision allowed by the language we're using to communicate right now).

Did that make sense?