Steve Petersen — LessWrong

LESSWRONG
LW

I didn't read as carefully as I'd like, but some quick comments:

I only recently figured out there's been persistent confusion between "original" and "intrinsic" intentionality in the literature (and in me). The former is intentionality that wasn't brought about by some other intentionality; the latter is intentionality that does not depend on interpretation (another's intentionality). This distinction can also apply to teleology. Helpful short paper: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3328876
It would be great to have a theory of function / telos that was ahistorical, since no one is crazy about the Swampman counterexample. But appealing to pure "structural" properties of something that ground its being supposed-to-do something (even if it fails) has turned out challenging. But maybe not impossible.

(I was going to just text you this but figured I should practice posting sometimes - catching some of your Inkhaven spirit maybe!)

Misrepresentation as a Barrier for Interp (Part I)

johnswentworth

johnswentworth, Steve Petersen

10mo

John: So there’s this thing about interp, where most of it seems to not be handling one of the standard fundamental difficulties of representation, and we want to articulate that in a way which will make sense to interp researchers (as opposed to philosophers). I guess to start… Steve, wanna give a standard canonical example of the misrepresentation problem?

Steve: Ok so I guess the “standard” story as I interpret it goes something like this:

In order to respond to dualists who thought the mind was inherently non-physical, materialist philosophers wanted a “naturalistic” account of mental representation - where “mental representation” basically means the same thing as “content” or “semantics”. We tend to use

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Replying toThe Logistics of Distribution of Meaning: Against Epistemic Bureaucratization

Steve Petersen1y

The Logistics of Distribution of Meaning: Against Epistemic Bureaucratization

As always, I'm inspired by Sahil's vision here! I've sat with his "high actuation spaces" and "live theory" for a while, and there's something really appealing about it. I'm eager to get a better sense of it, by which I mean I'm eager to hear the vibes get cashed out more concretely. But maybe that's against the spirit of the project? For example: what exactly is "sensitivity"? Or am I being insensitive just to ask?

Dialogue on What It Means For Something to Have A Function/Purpose

johnswentworth

johnswentworth, Ramana Kumar, Steve Petersen

Context for LW audience: Ramana, Steve and John regularly talk about stuff in the general cluster of agency, abstraction, optimization, compression, purpose, representation, etc. We decided to write down some of our discussion and post it here. This is a snapshot of us figuring stuff out together.

Hooks from Ramana:

Where does normativity come from?
Two senses of "why" (from Dennett): How come? vs What for? (The latter is more sophisticated, and less resilient. Does it supervene on the former?)
An optimisation process is something that produces/selects things according to some criterion. The products of an optimisation process will have some properties related to the optimisation criterion, depending on how good the process is at finding

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