The naïve way of understanding mind uploading is "we take the connectome of a brain, including synaptic connection weights and characters, and emulate it in a computer". However, people want their personalities to be uploaded, not just brains. That is more than just replicating the functionality of their brains in...
Let's continue from my previous post and look how Solomonoff induction fails to adequately deal with hypercomputation. You may have heard of the Physical Church-Turing thesis. It's the idea that the Universe can, in a perfect level of detail, be simulated on a Turing machine. (No problem if the Universe...
I've been trying to understand the uses and limitations of Solomonoff induction. Following the principle that in order to fully understand something you should explain it others, here's a try. I prefer to write such things in a form for dialogue, as that better reflects thought processes. This is not...
How do you evaluate whether any given model is useful of not?
One way is to simulate a perfect computational agent, assume perfect information, and see what kind of models it would construct.
If you reject the notion of an external reality that is accessible to us in at least some way, then you cannot really measure the performance of your models against any kind of a common standard.
Solomonoff induction provides a universal standard for "perfect" inductive inference, that is, learning from observations. It is not entirely parameter-free, so it's "a standard", not "the standard". I doubt if there is the standard for the same reasons I doubt that Platonic Truth does exist.
All you've got left are your internal thoughts and feelings
Umm, no, this is a false dichotomy. There is a large area in between "relying on one's intuition" and "relying on an objective external word". For example, how about "relying on the accumulated knowledge of others"?
See also my comment in the other thread.
I've got feeling that the implicit LessWrong'ish rationalist theory of truth is, in fact, some kind of epistemic (Bayesian) pragmatism, i.e. "true is that what is knowable using probability theory". May also throw in "..for a perfect computational agent".
My speculation is that the declared LW's sympathy towards the correspondence theory of truth stems from political / social reasons. We don't want to be confused with the uncritically thinking masses - the apologists of homoeopathy or astrology justifying their views by "yeah, I don't know how it works either, but it's useful!"; the middle-school teachers who are ready to threat scientific results as epistemological equals of their favourite theories coming from folk-psychology, religious dogmas, or "common sense knowledge", because, you known, "they all are true in some sense". Pragmatic theories of truth are dangerous if they come into the wrong hands.
What do you mean by "direct access to the world"?
Are you familiar with Kant? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noumenon
This description fits philosophy much better than science.
Sounds like a form of abduction, or, more precisely, failure to consider alternative hypotheses.
As for your options, have you considered the possibility that 99% of people have never formulated a coherent philosophical view on the theory of truth?
I'd love to hear a more qualified academic philosopher discuss this, but I'll try. It's not that the other theories are intuitively appealing, it's that the correspondence theory of truth has a number of problems, such as the problem of induction.
Let's say the one day we create a complete simulation of a universe where the physics almost completely match ours, except some minor details, such as that some specific types of elementary particles, e.g. neutrinos are never allowed to appear. Suppose that there are scientists in the simulation, and they work out the Standard Model of their physics. The model presupposes existence of neutrinos, but their measurement devices are never going to... (read 581 more words →)
I meant that as a comment to this:
the information less useful than what you'd get by just asking a few questions.
It's easy to lie when answering to questions about your personality on e.g. a dating site. It's harder, more expensive, and sometimes impossible to lie via signaling, such as via appearance. So, even though information obtained by asking questions is likely to be much richer than information obtained from appearances, it is also less likely to be truthful.
..assuming the replies are truthful.
The naïve way of understanding mind uploading is "we take the connectome of a brain, including synaptic connection weights and characters, and emulate it in a computer". However, people want their personalities to be uploaded, not just brains. That is more than just replicating the functionality of their brains in silico.
This nuance has lead to some misunderstandings, for example, to experts wondering [1] why on Earth would anyone think that brain-centredness [2] (the idea that brains are "sufficient" in some vague sense) is a necessary prerequisite for successful whole brain emulation. Of course, brain-centredness is not required for brain uploading to be technically successful; the problem is whether it is sufficient for... (read 776 more words →)
Let's continue from my previous post and look how Solomonoff induction fails to adequately deal with hypercomputation.
You may have heard of the Physical Church-Turing thesis. It's the idea that the Universe can, in a perfect level of detail, be simulated on a Turing machine. (No problem if the Universe turns out to be infinite - the thesis requires only that each finite portion of it can be simulated.) A corollary to the Physical CTT is the idea that there are no physically realizable uncomputable processes. We can talk about hypercomputers as mathematical abstractions, but we'll never be able to build (or see) one.
We don't have a very strong scientific evidence for the
... (read 929 more words →)I've been trying to understand the uses and limitations of Solomonoff induction. Following the principle that in order to fully understand something you should explain it others, here's a try. I prefer to write such things in a form for dialogue, as that better reflects thought processes.
This is not a very-in-depth technical article - for example, cousin_it and Wen Dai has obviously spent more time pondering about SI. (I'm not a long-time LW reader, but have skimmed through existing LW and wiki articles on related topics before posting this.)
Alice. Hi, I'm interested in the question of why and when should I prefer simpler hypotheses. I've heard about Occam's razor and I've read... (read 2116 more words →)
I agree with pragmatist (the OP) that this is a problem for the correspondence theory of truth.
Usefulness? Just don't say "experimental evidence". Don't oversimplify epistemic justification. There are many aspects - how well knowledge fits with existing models, with observations, what is it's predictive power, what is it's instrumental value (does it help to achieve one's goals) etc. For example, we don't have any experimental evidence that smoking causes cancer in humans, but we nevertheless believe that is does. The power of Bayesian approach is in the mechanism to fuse together all these different forms of evidence and to arrive at a single posterior probability.