Shane_Legg comments on Timeless Causality - Less Wrong

21 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 29 May 2008 06:45AM

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

Comments (63)

Sort By: Old

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: Shane_Legg 30 May 2008 09:26:38PM 0 points [-]

I don't see the point in all this.

We have this mathematical Platonia object and the relation across the time dimension is not symmetric: in what we call increasing values of time slices of the Platonia get larger. If you want to talk about some of the structures in the Platonia as "timeless causation" or "computation" then, sure, I have no problem with that. But I don't see that you've created or rescued anything, you've just defined existing words in terms of the Platonia's structure.

I certainly don't see why you are being "forced to grind up reality into disconnected configurations". Why not continuous time? Then you don't need "glue between them" as there is no between. Speaking of which, your example is in discrete time, but does it hold in continuous time? From mathematical finance I've learnt that many counter intuitive things can happen in continuous time stochastic processes. Unfortunately, I'm only just coming to terms with discrete time martingale theory and haven't yet progressed to the continuous case - so I can't answer this question myself.