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Wei_Dai comments on Beware Selective Nihilism - Less Wrong Discussion
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Assume it has infinite computing power. The AI thing is just a way of asking this question: if something knew all the facts about the things physical laws keep track of and directly operate on, and it were logically omniscient, would it know, for example, that this thing here is a tulip, that it's alive, etc.?
If not (I gather from your post that the answer is 'no') then it seems we should conclude one of two things:
1) Tulips are not in the territory, or,
2) Tulips are in the territory, but (for some reason) some facts about tulips are not derivable from facts about ontologically primitive things.
Which do you think is right? Or have I left out one or more possibilities?
(EDIT: I changed the example from 'me' to 'tulips' to avoid the impression that this question has anything to do with consciousness)
I'm also not sure what you mean by "Are tulips are in the territory?" or why you are asking me that. There seem to be collections or structures of ontologically primitive objects in the territory that correspond to the objects in our internal models that we label as "tulips". From this, can you derive for yourself whether "tulips are in the territory"?
I'm trying to get some grip on the relation between ontologically primitive things and ontologically non-primitive things. A second question lurking about here is one raised by some of EY's recent talk about ontology as he would want it programmed into an AI.
We didn't all start by understanding ontological primitives and discover that human beings exist. We started with human beings and discovered that facts about human beings are reducible to facts about ontological primitives (discovering what those primitives were along the way). But does the fact that we went from human beings down to ontological primitives mean that something that started from ontological primitives would discover human beings?
But if the question isn't clear, or feels unmotivating, then I withdraw it, and I appreciate your answers thus far.