satt comments on Second-Order Logic: The Controversy - LessWrong

24 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 04 January 2013 07:51PM

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Comment author: Qiaochu_Yuan 04 January 2013 10:43:08PM *  16 points [-]

One of the participants in this dialogue seems too concerned with pinning down models uniquely and also seems too convinced he knows what model he's in. Suppose we live in a simulation which is being run by superbeings who have access to oracles that can tell them when Turing machines are attempting to find contradictions in PA. Whenever they detect that something in the simulation is attempting to find contradictions in PA, that part of the simulation mysteriously stops working after the billionth or trillionth step or something. Then running such Turing machines can't tell us whether we live in a universe where PA is consistent or not.

I also wish both participants in the dialogue would take ultrafinitism more seriously. It is not as wacky as it sounds, and it seems like a good idea to be conservative about such things when designing AI.

Edit: Here is an ultrafinitist fable that might be useful or at least amusing, from the link.

I have seen some ultrafinitists go so far as to challenge the existence of 2^100 as a natural number, in the sense of there being a series of 'points' of that length. There is the obvious 'draw the line' objection, asking where in 2^1, 2^2, 2^3, … , 2^100 do we stop having 'Platonistic reality'? Here this … is totally innocent, in that it can be easily be replaced by 100 items (names) separated by commas. I raised just this objection with the (extreme) ultrafinitist Yesenin-Volpin during a lecture of his.

He asked me to be more specific. I then proceeded to start with 2^1 and asked him whether this is 'real' or something to that effect. He virtually immediately said yes. Then I asked about 2^2, and he again said yes, but with a perceptible delay. Then 2^3, and yes, but with more delay. This continued for a couple of more times, till it was obvious how he was handling this objection. Sure, he was prepared to always answer yes, but he was going to take 2^100 times as long to answer yes to 2^100 then he would to answering 2^1. There is no way that I could get very far with this.

Comment author: satt 05 January 2013 12:35:19AM *  1 point [-]

What precisely do the Overflowers (and the mathematician reporting that anecdote) mean by the "existence" of a number?

For instance, I see that the anecdote-reporter refers to there being a series of points of a particular length, but I assume they don't mean that in an intuitive, literal sense: there are certainly at least 2^100 Planck lengths between me and the other end of the room.

Comment author: Qiaochu_Yuan 05 January 2013 12:47:28AM *  5 points [-]

I am not sure. If I tabooed "exist," then my best guess is that ultrafinitists would argue that statements involving really big numbers are not meaningful. For example, they might argue that such statements are not verifiable in the real world. (Edit: as another example, as I mentioned in another comment, ultrafinitists might argue that you cannot count to really big numbers.)

For instance, I see that the anecdote-reporter refers to there being a series of points of a particular length, but I assume they don't mean that in an intuitive, literal sense: there are certainly at least 2^100 Planck lengths between me and the other end of the room.

Yes, but just barely: 2^100 Planck lengths is something like 2 x 10^{-5} meters, so substitute 2^1000 Planck lengths, which is substantially larger than the diameter of the universe.

Comment author: khafra 07 January 2013 07:57:50PM 2 points [-]

Seems weird to think that some of the possible configurations of bits on my 1.5TB hard drive don't exist. Which ones? I hope none of the really good collections of pr0n are logically unreachable.

If that number does exist, then what about really big busy beaver numbers, like bb(2^10^13 )? They're just a series of computations on hard drive contents. And that number is so close to infinity that we might as well just step from ultrafinitism to plain old finitism.

Comment author: ygert 07 January 2013 08:28:50PM 2 points [-]

While I am not an ultrafinitist, I believe the idea is meant to be this: It is not valid to talk about those numbers, because there is no meaningful thing you can do with those numbers that can affect the real world. Therefore, the ultrafinitists say that it is not really logical to treat these numbers as "existing" as they can not affect the real world at all, and why say that something exists if it cannot affect anything at all?

Comment author: abramdemski 08 January 2013 04:20:27AM 0 points [-]

I hope none of the really good collections of pr0n are logically unreachable.

This seems incredibly likely, doesn't it? (As long as we are happy to bound 'logically reachable' to within the observable universe.)

Comment author: Qiaochu_Yuan 07 January 2013 10:48:23PM *  0 points [-]

Seems weird to think that some of the possible configurations of bits on my 1.5TB hard drive don't exist.

Would you like to go through all of them just to be sure? How long do you think that will take you?

what about really big busy beaver numbers, like bb(2^10^13 )? They're just a series of computations on hard drive contents.

Trying to actually compute a sufficiently large busy beaver number, you'll run into the problem that there won't be enough material in the observable universe to construct the corresponding Turing machines and/or that there won't be enough usable energy to power them for the required lengths of time and/or that the heat death of the universe will occur before the required lengths of time. If there's no physical way to go through the relevant computations, there's no physical sense in which the relevant computations output a result.

Comment author: [deleted] 07 January 2013 11:10:15PM 3 points [-]

It may not be possible to check all of them, but it certainly is possible to check one of them...any one of them. And whichever one you choose to check, you'll find that it exists. So if you claim that some of the possible configurations don't exist, you're claiming they'd have to be among the ones you don't choose to check. But wait, this implies that your choice of which one(s) to check somehow affects which ones exist. It sure would be spooky if that somehow turns out to be the case, which I doubt.

Comment author: khafra 08 January 2013 01:33:37PM 0 points [-]

Exactly. And I could make my choice of which pr0n library to check--or which 1.5TB turing machine to run--dependent on 10^13 quantum coinflips; which, while it would take a while, seems physically realizable.