You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

Benja comments on Decision Theories, Part 3.75: Hang On, I Think This Works After All - Less Wrong Discussion

23 Post author: orthonormal 06 September 2012 04:23PM

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

Comments (45)

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

Comment author: Benja 06 September 2012 11:18:55PM *  5 points [-]

I think to be rigorous you need to consider proof lengths explicitly (like cousin_it did with his proofs).

This is clearly not what orthonormal meant, but I think if you interpret the "provable in PA+i" function as a call to a halting oracle, all the parts that raise questions about proof lengths just go through. (I also had the impression that each step in the post should break down to a formal proof whose length is O(l), where l is the length of the expression specifying how many proofs are searched; if so, everything should work out for a large enough proof limit. I think this was orthonormal's intent. However, I haven't checked this in detail.)

Can you explain how PA+3 can prove that PA through PA+2 won't have found proofs of contrary conclusions?

Let me try something, without a high degree of confidence--

The following reasoning is in PA+3, using the halting oracle interpretation so that I do not need to worry about proof lengths. We assume that 'M(FB)=C' is provable in PA+3 and that FB(M) != C, and try to derive a contradiction.

It follows directly that FB(M)=D; given our assumption, this means that PA+2 proves 'M(FB)=D'. Since we're in PA+3, it follows that M(FB)=D. But we also know that if 'FB(M)=C' is provable in PA+3, then M(FB)=C (as stated in the proof of Lemma 8, right before the contentious argument). Thus, if M(FB)=D, then PA+3 does not prove 'FB(M)=C'. This means that PA+3 is consistent. But we also know (given our assumptions) that PA+3 proves both 'M(FB)=C' and 'M(FB)=D' (the latter because PA+3 proves everything that PA+2 proves); contradiction.

Comment author: orthonormal 09 September 2012 01:03:42AM 2 points [-]

It took me a while to sit down and work through it, but the proof works! Thanks for patching the pothole I didn't see.