Comment on Reductionism

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 03:19:22 GMT

I got "reductionism" wrong, actually. I thought the author was using some nonstandard definition of reductionism, which would have been something to the effect of not having unnecessary declarations in a theory. I did not take into account that the author could actually be what he says he is, no bells and whistles, because I didn't take into account that reductionism could be taken seriously here. But that just means I misjudged. Of course I am not necessarily even supposed to be on this site. I am looking for people who might give useful ideas for theoretical work which could be useful for constructing AI, and I'm trying to check whether my approach is deemed intelligible here.

"Realism" is the belief that there is an external world, usually thought to consist of quarks, leptons, forces and such. It is typically thought of as a belief or a doctrine that is somehow true, instead of just an assumption an AI or a human makes because it needs to. Depending on who labels themself as a realist and on what mood is he, this can entail that everybody who is not a realist is considered mistaken.

An example of a problem whose solution does not need to involve realism is: "John is a small kid who seems to emulate his big brother almost all the time. Why is he doing this?" Possible answers would be: "He thinks his brother is cool" or "He wants to annoy his brother" or "He doesn't emulate his brother, they are just very similar". Of course you could just brain scan John. But if you really knew John, that's not what you would do, unless brain scanners were about as common and inexpensive as laptops. And have much better functionality than they currently do.

In the John problem, there's no need to construct the assumptions of a physical world, because the problem would be intelligible even in the case you meet John in a dream. You can't take any physical brain scanner with you in a dream, so you can't brain scan John. But you can analyze John's behavior with the same criteria according to which you would analyze him had you met him while awake.

I'm not trying to impose any views on you, because I'm basically just trying to find out whether someone is interested of this kind of stuff. The point is that I'm trying to construct a framework theory for AI that is not grounded on anything else than sensory (or emotional etc.) perception - all the abstract parts are defined recursively. Structurally, the theory is intended to resemble a programming language with dynamic typing, as opposed to static typing. The theory would be pretty much both philosophy and AI.

The problem I see now is this. My theory, RP, is founded on the notion that important parts of thinking are based on metaphysical emergence. The main recursion loop of the theory, in its current form, will not create any information if only reduction is allowed. I would allow both, but if the people on LW are reductionist, I would suppose that the logical consequence of that would be they believe my theory cannot work. And that's why I'm a bit troubled by the notion that you might accept reductionism as some sort of an axiom, because you don't want to have a long philosophical conversation and would prefer to settle down with something that currently seems reasonable. So should I expect you to not want to consider other options? It's strange that I should go elsewhere with my project, because that would amount to you rejecting an AI theory on grounds of contradicting your philosophical assumptions. Yet, my common sense expectation would be that you'd find AI more important than philosophy.

Discuss