All of Yegreg's Comments + Replies

We'll likely record and publish the lectures at least. The homework problems might be saved for future use, we'll see what makes sense.

We'll likely record the lectures at least. The homework problems might be saved for future use, we'll see what makes sense.

Right now we have no concrete plans to run future iterations of this course. We have discussed recording and releasing the lectures however. Also, Vanessa is gauging interest for a summer mentorship program, which can be a good opportunity for a deeper dive into these topics.

It means that for all pairs of distinct states, their associated environments (sets of compatible observation sequences) are disjoint.

I confirm, I see your application on our side.

Yes, that's right.

Note also that those questions are included for the sake of giving the reader a sense of the general flavor of the subject. The actual course will use a different set of homework questions, focused on the topics listed above.

Right, that's a cliff-hanger from the screenshot. You can find the full list of questions used in the summer workshop linked before the screenshot too if you wanted to see more detail.

If it's just questions about the notation, please also feel free to ask here whatever is unclear, I'm happy to clarify (I understand that I kept the wording of the questions quite brief).

Good question! I decided we'll close the application March 1st, in order to leave us some time to select a cohort and finalize logistics with them. I updated the post with this deadline.

I would say the translation across ontologies is carried out by "computationalism" in this case, rather than infra-Bayesianism itself. That is, (roughly speaking) we consider which computations are instantiated in various ontologies, and base our loss function off of that. From this viewpoint infra-Bayesianism comes in as an ingredient of a specific implementation of computationalism (namely, infra-Bayesian physicalism). In this perspective the need for infra-Bayesianism is motivated by the fact that an agent needs to have Knightean uncertainty over part of the computational universe (e.g. the part relating to its own source code). Let me know if this helps clarify things.

Thanks for clarifying. I'll try to answer the original question first, and then expand a little on the comparison with other interpretations that might help understand the motivation for this work a little better.

I'm imagining on the high level you have something like the following in mind (correct me if not). Suppose $\Phi$ is all the possible states of the universe, and suppose we have a subset of possible worlds (the "multiverse") $M\subset \Phi$, then we might simply say we have Knightian uncertainty over the possible worlds, which would correspond to an... (read more)

What do you mean by a mathematically precise interpretation? And what would it mean to have an infra-Bayesian formalization of any such interpretation?

This is not super tightly related, but seems worth mentioning because it's interesting.

There's an interesting result in Quantum Field Theory called the Reeh-Schlieder theorem, which can be interpreted to mean that any open spacetime region contains the information of all of spacetime. So in principle you could know the past and future of the whole universe by watching a toe for any small amount of time, although this knowing refers to quantum information, and even then this seems entirely impractical due to some exponential decays.