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Esar comments on Beware Selective Nihilism - Less Wrong Discussion

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

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Comment author: [deleted] 28 December 2012 09:34:35PM *  0 points [-]

Tulips objectively exist as a fuzzy cluster in configuration space, and if an AI were to list all facts about the world, this would be one of them.

I was being a bit ambiguous: I mean to talk about concrete individual tulips, not the species. Even given the framework in 'The Cluster Structure...", each actual tulip is a point in thingspace, not a cluster.

Comment author: Wei_Dai 28 December 2012 10:02:34PM *  1 point [-]

If an AI were to list all facts about the world, it would list that the wavefunction of the universe can be approximately factored into X, where X corresponds to what we would call an individual tulip. (Note that an individual tulip is also actually a cluster in configuration space, because it's a blob of amplitude-factor, not a single point in configuration space. Of course this cluster is much smaller than the cluster of all tulips.)

Comment author: [deleted] 28 December 2012 10:11:01PM 1 point [-]

Okay, that answers my question, thanks.