All of hex50's Comments + Replies

hex5010

The problem might go all the up to the notion of correspondence to reality itself. There's no simple way of stating that we're accessing reality without that also constituting a representation.

Your mutual information is between representations coming from one part of your mind to other parts; likewise what is considered "accurate" information about reality is really just accuracy relative to some idealized set of expectations from some other model that would take the photos as evidence.

hex5040

Your three criterion are remarkably similar to the three criterion David Deutsch uses to distinguish between good and bad explanations. He argues this via negativa by stating what makes explanations bad.

From The Logic of Experimental Tests:

[A]n explanation is bad (or worse than a rival or variant explanation) to the extent that...
(i) it seems not to account for its explicanda; or
(ii) it seems to conflict with explanations that are otherwise good; or
(iii) it could easily be adapted to account for anything (so it explains nothing).

The first princ... (read more)