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Wei_Dai comments on Beware Selective Nihilism - Less Wrong Discussion

39 Post author: Wei_Dai 20 December 2012 06:53PM

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Comment author: Wei_Dai 25 December 2012 01:30:15AM 2 points [-]

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"?

Comment author: [deleted] 25 December 2012 03:03:37AM 1 point [-]

I'm also not sure what you mean by "Are tulips are in the territory?" or why you are asking me that.

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.