one can also start to realize, as in the example of hofstadter, or of teaching a rock, that the foundamental believes are just the automatic dynamics of thoughts, so believeing something completely different would just be changing those dynamics, which would be equivalent changing the "meaning" of things, and so i dont think there's any sense in which "2+2=3" could be true that doesnt involve redefining things
But how does not this story about 2+2=3 apply too to the belief in god for example? If you are raised in the right circumstances, you will end up with this belief you think its unconditional, even though it was conditonal on your circumstances. Arent ultimately all believes entangled with reality by virtue of believes being encoded in the brain which is a physical system entangled with reality? to not fall in a fallacy of gray, we can conceede that some ways of entanglement are better than others, in that they lead to mora accurate believes. Hmmm
In any cas...
"f they say that they'd be emotionally disturbed by knowing, specify that they won't know about the torture."
Couldn't one argue that having preferences about things u assume u dont know, wouldn't affect your actions?
When I'm deciding on an actual action, I can only take into account things I know, and nothing else?
So the preference of the case where I would never know about the person being tortured couldn't affect my actions, so in that sense doesn't matter?
I'd like to add some points to this interesting discussion:
As far as I understand, feature learning is not necessary for some standard types of transfer learning. E.g.: one can train an NNGP on a large dataset, and then use the learned posterior as prior for "fine-tuning" on some new dataset. This is hard to scale using actual GP techniques, but if wide neural nets (with random sampling or SGD) do approximate NNGPs, this could be a way they achieve transfer learning without feature learning.
You say
...In contrast, in the case of SGD, it's possible to do featur
Yep. See also the related Fun Criterion which I think sounds related to Reflective Equilibrium.
I think not only should we expect to end with many reflective equilbria, one per individual, even for an individual, we dont expect they'd reach a reflective equilibrium, as they will keep evolving th... (read more)