constant3 comments on Possibility and Could-ness - Less Wrong

34 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 14 June 2008 04:38AM

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Comment author: constant3 20 June 2008 11:21:00AM 1 point [-]

Is this substantially correct?

I would say not, because you write:

and determining that the phenomenon is reachable.

This uses the word "reachable" in a sentence, without quotes, and therefore makes use of its meaning. But that was merely an infelicitous choice of label. Eliezer has since asked you to substitute labels, so that you not be confused by the meaning of "reachable":

Knecht, for "able to be reached" substitute "labeled fizzbin". I have told you when to label something fizzbin.

If you were to substitute this in, your description would end up being:

Thesis: regarding some phenomenon as possible is nothing other than the inner perception a person experiences (and probably also the memory of such a perception in the past) after mentally running something like the search algorithm and labeling the phenomenon "fizzbin".

I am not, by the way, sure that this quite captures Eliezer's thesis either, since an algorithm could attach many labels, and the above does not pick out which label corresponds to possibility. You may need to start from scratch.