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.

pragmatist comments on How do you notice when you are ignorant of necessary alternative hypotheses? - Less Wrong Discussion

16 [deleted] 24 June 2014 06:12PM

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

Article Navigation

Comments (69)
Tags: solomonoff rationality probability bayes

Comments (69)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: pragmatist 25 June 2014 10:50:19AM *  13 points [-]

The problem was, he eliminated the impossible, but left open a huge vast space of possible hypotheses that he didn't know about (but which we do): the most common of these is the computational theory of mind and consciousness, which says that we are made of cognitive algorithms.

Wait, are you suggesting that the reviewer (Jerry Fodor) is unaware of the computational theory of mind? Unlikely, given that he is one of its progenitors. From the wikipedia article on the computational theory:

The theory was proposed in its modern form by Hilary Putnam in 1961, and developed by the MIT philosopher and cognitive scientist (and Putnam's PhD student) Jerry Fodor in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s

Comment author: TheAncientGeek 25 June 2014 03:33:32PM *  10 points [-]

Yep. Eli failed to consider the hypothesis that the philosophers who reject CTM do so because they have objections to it, rather than because they have never heard if it.

Powered by Reddit Powered by Reddit