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shminux comments on Request for Steelman: Non-correspondence concepts of truth - Less Wrong Discussion

13 Post author: PeerGynt 24 March 2015 03:11AM

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Comment author: shminux 24 March 2015 11:51:45PM 2 points [-]

Your wording:

If my model says the sky should be blue, and I go out and look and the sky is blue, my model corresponds to reality.

My wording:

If my model says the sky should be blue, and I go out and look and the sky is blue, my model is accurate/useful, etc.

I.e. I make no claims about reality beyond it occasionally being a useful metamodel.

It seems to me that a model which corresponds to reality and yet is incorrect (does not match the world) is a logical impossibility.

In the dualist reality+models ontology, yes. If you don't make any ontological assumptions about anything 'existing" beyond models, the above statement is not impossible, it is meaningless, as it uses undefined terms.

Comment author: [deleted] 25 March 2015 12:12:23AM 2 points [-]

Is there any actionable difference between the two viewpoints?

Comment author: shminux 25 March 2015 02:26:04AM *  -1 points [-]

Yes. For example, you don't bother arguing about untestables. Is MWI true? Who cares, unless you can construct a testable prediction out of this model, it is not even a meaningful question. What about Tegmark 4? Same thing.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 25 March 2015 04:30:49AM *  1 point [-]

You may care about different worlds to different extents, with "truth" of a possible world being the degree of caring. In that case, it may be useful for evaluating (the relative weights of) consequences of decisions, which may be different for different worlds, even if the worlds can't be distinguished based on observation.

Comment author: shminux 25 March 2015 05:59:54AM *  0 points [-]

And that's another "actionable difference". I care about possible/counter-factual worlds only to the degree they can become actual. I don't worry about potential multiple copies of me in the infinite universe, because "what if they are me?", not until there is a measurable effect associated with it.

Comment author: [deleted] 25 March 2015 03:41:18AM 0 points [-]

Heh, my intuition is the opposite. What I felt but so far refrained from saying today was "Stop arguing about whether reality exists or not! it doesn't change anything." It seems we agree on that at least.

Comment author: buybuydandavis 25 March 2015 03:57:53AM 1 point [-]

I.e. I make no claims about reality beyond it occasionally being a useful metamodel.

It's really about the accuracy of your model in terms of predictions it makes, whether or not we can find any correspondence between those hidden variables and other observables?

Is that what you're getting at?

Comment author: shminux 25 March 2015 04:09:11AM 0 points [-]

I don't understand what you mean by hidden variables in this context.

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