All of Polytopos's Comments + Replies

Science and Sanity looks pretty interesting. In the book summary it says he stressed that strict logical identity doesn't hold in reality. Can you say more about how he builds up a logical system without using the law of identity? How does equational reasoning work for example?

Various fisheries have become so depleted as to no longer be commercially viable. One of the obvious examples is the Canadian Maritime fisheries. Despite advanced warning that overfishing was leading to a collapse in cod populations, they were fished to the point of commercial non-viability, resulting in a regional economic collapse that caused depressed standards of living in the maritime provinces to this day.

according to the story that your brain is telling, there is some phenomenology to it. But there isn't.

Doesn't this assume that we know what sort of thing phenomenological consciousness (qualia) is supposed to be so that we can assert that the story the brain is telling us about qualia somehow fails to measure up to this independent standard of qualia-reality?

The trouble I have with this is that there is no such independent standard for what phenomenal blueness has to be in order to count as genuinely phenomenal. The only standard we have for identifying... (read more)

For an in depth argument that could taken to support this point, I highly recommend Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman.

it generalises. Logic and probability and interpretation and theorisation and all that, are also outputs of the squishy stuff in your head. So it seems that epistemology is not first philosophy, because it is downstream of neuroscience.

I find this claim interesting. I’m not entirely sure what you intend by the word “downstream” but I will interpret it as saying that logic and probability are epistemically justified by neuroscience. In particular, I understand this to include that claim a priori intuition unverified by neuroscience is not sufficient to j... (read more)

This is a fascinating article about how the concept of originality differs in some Eastern cultures https://aeon.co/essays/why-in-china-and-japan-a-copy-is-just-as-good-as-an-original

An interesting contribution to is this book by Hofstadter and Sanders

They explain thinking in terms of analogy, which as they use the term encompasses metaphor. This book is the a mature cognitive sciencey articulation of many of the fun and loose ideas that Hofstadter first explored in G.E.B.

I'm curious how many people here think of rationalism as synonymous with something like Quinean Naturalism (or just naturalism/physicalism in general). It strikes me that naturalism/physicalism is a specific view one might come to hold on the basis of a rationalist approach to inquiry, but it should not be mistaken for rationalism itself. In particular, when it comes to investigating foundational issues in epistemology/ontology a rationalist should not simply take it as a dogma that naturalism answers all those questions. Quine's Epistemology Naturalized i... (read more)

You might be interested to look at David Corfield's book Modal Homotopy Type Theory. In the chapter on modal logic, he shows how all the different variants of modal logic can be understood as monads/comands. This allows us to understand modality in terms of "thinking in a context", where the context (possible worlds) can be given a rigorous meaning categorically and type theoretically (using slice categories).

I really enjoyed this post. It was fun to read and really drove home the point about starting with examples. I also thought it was helpful that it didn't just saying, "teach by example". I feel that simplistic idea is all too common and often leads to bad teaching where example after example is given with no clear definitions or high level explanations. However, this article emphasized how one needs to build on the example to connect it with abstract ideas. This creates a bridge between what we already understand and what we are learning.

As I was thinking... (read more)

Excellent article, thank you. I particularly enjoyed your images and diagrams. To me concept diagrams are another superpower for explaining things. Have you written anything about that?

Personally, I thought "mind-hanger" was ok. I got an image of a coat-hanger for the mind. You could even include that image explicitly in your concept mapping pictures.

Some other ideas that stick with the coat-hanger variant would be "idea-hanger", "concept-hanger".

Another term you might consider is scaffolding. This also has a strong concrete image of construction scaffolding, but the metaphor lends itself to the idea of building on top of the skeletal example, just as we start a building project with a scaffold and then build the real building around it.... (read more)

I think I can fruitfully engage in truth evaluation of grue things wihtout agreeing or supposing that grue is fitting.

As indicated in the post, fittingness is dependent on the domain D under study. If we take grue to be a term in the study of colour, it is profoundly ill-fitting. I think it is a fair assessment that no researcher who studies colour would find it fruitful or salient to evaluate the truth of propositions involving grue. The picture changes however if we let D be philosophy of science. In that case, grue is fitting, precisely because it il... (read more)

The term I introduced is "fittingness" not fitness. Fittingness is meant to evoke both fit, as in whether a pair of shoes fit my feet, and also fitting, as in "that is a fitting word choice for this sentence". It is possible that there is another term which would be a better label for the underlying concept. If you have suggestions for alternatives I would love to hear them.

I think it's important that the word is specific, not general. As you point out, we could use a general term qualified with a lengthy phrase like: "success with respect to concept forma... (read more)

Thanks, you are correct. I have updated the post to reflect this.

Fittingness is not the same as telos/purpose/concern. It is a success concept for a specific telos/purpose/concern, namely that belonging to rational inquiry. In other words, it indicates that one has formed a concept or ontology which is successful for the purpose of rational inquiry. Of course, there might be other purposes governing concept formation which would have their own success concepts. For example, if one's purpose is to craft deceptive propaganda then the relevant success concept might be slipperyness or something.

The author does a good job articulating his views on why Buddhist concentration and insight practices can lead to psychological benefits. As somebody who has spent years practicing these practices and engaging with various types of (Western) discourse about them, the author's psychological claims seem plausible to a point. He does not offer a compelling mechanism for why introspective awareness of sankharas should lead to diminishing them. He also offers no account for why if insight does dissolve psychological patterns, it would preferentially dissolve ne... (read more)

A few of points.  First I've heard several AI researchers say that GPT-3 is already close to the limit of all high quality human generated text data.  While the amount of text on the internet will continue to grow,  it might not grow fast enough for major continued improvement. Thus additional media might be necessary for training input. 

Second deaf blind people still have multiple senses that allow them to build 3D sensory-motor models of reality (touch,  smell,  taste,  proprioception,  vestibular,  sound vibr... (read more)

What happens when OpenAI simply expands this method of token prediction to train with every kind of correlated multi-media on the internet?  Audio,  video,  text,  images,  semantic web ontologies, and scientific data.  If they also increase the buffer size and token complexity,  how close does this get us to AGI?

Ah, this post brings back so many memories of studying philosophy of science in grad school. Great job summarizing Structure. 

One book that I found very helpful in understanding Kuhn's views in relations to philosophical questions like the objectivity vs mind-dependence of reality is Dynamics of Reason by Michael Friedman. Here Friedman relates Kuhn's ideas both to Kant's notion of categories of the understanding and to Rudolf Carnap's ontological pragmatism. 

The upshot of Friedman's book is the idea of the constitutive a priori which roughly is ... (read more)

Thanks, I just watched Victor's Seeing Spaces talk and it is really cool. 

Wow, there is a lot to dig into here. Thanks for this.

The trouble is that these antibodies are not logical.  On the contrary; these antibodies are often highly illogical. They are the blind spots that let us live with a dangerous meme without being impelled to action by it.

That is a brilliant point. I also loved you description of the Buddhist monk taking questions from a Western audience. The image of incompatible knowledge blocks is a great one, that actually makes a lot of sense of how various ideologically conditioned people are able to functionally operate. 

The example that comes up for me is a... (read more)

There is a wonderful scene in the new Pixar film Soul where they show a "lost soul" who turns out to be a hedge fund trader who just keeps saying, "gotta make the trade". Your description of your high income clients reminded me of that. 

I find it hard to believe your prediction that this breakthrough will be insignificant given what I've read in other reputable sources. I give a pretty high initial credence to the scientific claims of publications like Nature which had this to say in their article on Alphafold2:

The ability to accurately predict protein structures from their amino-acid sequence would be a huge boon to life sciences and medicine. It would vastly accelerate efforts to understand the building blocks of cells and enable quicker and more advanced drug discovery.

reference

Agreed. Open AI did a study on the trends of algorithm efficiency. They found a 44x improvement in training efficiency on ImageNet over 7 years.

https://openai.com/blog/ai-and-efficiency/

I find reading this post and the ensuing discussion quite interesting because I studied academic philosophy (both analytic and continental) for about 12 years at university. Then I changed course and moved into programming and math, and developed a strong interest thinking about AI safety.

I find this debate a bit strange. Academic philosophy has its problems, but it's also a massive treasure trove of interesting ideas and rigorous arguments. I can understand the feeling of not wanting to get bogged down in the endless minutia of academic philosophizing in ... (read more)

Ah, thanks for clarifying. So the key issue is really the adjusted for inflation/deflation part. You are saying even if previously expensive goods become very cheap due to automation, they will still be valued in "real dollars" the same for the productivity calculation. 

Does this mean that a lot rides on how economists determine comparable baskets of goods at different times and also on how far back they look for a historical reference frame?

Thanks for your comment Phil. That's helpful, I hadn't considered the question of where labour shifts after less of it is needed to produce an existing good. 

I understand you as saying that as productivity increases in a field and market demand becomes saturated then the workers move elsewhere. This shift of labour to new sectors could (and historically did) lead to more overall productivity, but I think this trend may not continue with the current waves of automation. It seems possible that now areas of the economy where workers move to are those les... (read more)

I second this book recommendation. I just finished reading it and it is well written and well argued. Bregman explicitly contrasts Hobbes' pessimistic view of human nature with Rousseau's positive view. According to the most recent evidence Rousseau was correct.

His evolutionary argument is that social learning was the overwhelming fitness inducing ability that drove human evolution. As a result we evolved for friendliness and cooperation as a byproduct of selection for social learning.

I don't know enough math to understand your response. However, from the bits I can understand, it seems leave open the epistemic issue of needing an account of demostrative knowledge that is not dependent on Bayesian probability.

Interesting. This might be somewhat off topic, but I'm curious how would such an Bayesian analysis of mathematical knowledge explain the fact that it is provable that any number of randomly selected real numbers are non-computable with a probability 1, yet this is not equivalent to a proof that all real numbers are non-computable. The real numbers 1, 1.4, square root 2, pi, etc are all computable numbers, although the probability of such numbers occurring in an empirical sample of the domain is zero.

I was excited by the initial direction of the article, but somewhat disappointed with how it unfolded.

In terms of Leibniz's hope for a universal formal language we may be closer to that. The new book Modal Homotopy Type Theory (2020 by David Corfield) argues that much of the disappointment with formal languages among philosophers and linguists stems from the fact that through the 20th century most attempts to formalize natural language did so with first-order predicate logic or other logics that lacked dependent types. Yet, dependent types are natura... (read more)

I disagree with the idea that one doesn't have intuitions about generalization if one hasn't studied mathematics. One things that I find so interesting about CT is that it is so general it applies as much to everyday common sense concepts as it does to mathematical ones. David Spivak's ontology logs are a great illustration of this.

I do agree that there isn't a really good beginners book that covers category theory in a general way. But there are some amazing YouTube lectures. I got started on CT with this series, Category Theory for Be... (read more)

It seems odd to equate rationality with probabilistic reasoning. Philosophers have always distinguished between demonstrative (i.e., mathematical) reasoning and probabilistic (i.e., empirical) reasoning. To say that rationality is constituted only by the latter form reasoning is very odd, especially considering that it is only though demonstrative knowledge that we can even formulate such things as Bayesian mathematics.

Category theory is a meta-theory of demonstrative knowledge. It helps us understand how concepts relate to each other in a rigorous way. ... (read more)

David Spivak offers an account of Categories as database schemas with path equivalencies that is similar to the account you've given here in his book Category Theory for the Sciences. He still presents the traditional definitions, giving examples mainly from the category of sets and functions. I also didn't find his presentation of database schema definition especially easy to understand, but it is very useful when you realize that a functor is a systematic migration of data between schemas.

Thanks for your comment. My replies are below.

"so Gisin's musings... are guaranteed to be not a step in any progress of the understanding of physics."

What is your epistemic justification for asserting such a guarantee of failure? Of course, any new speculative idea in theoretical physics is far from likely to be adopted as part of the core theory, but you are making a much stronger claim by saying that it will not even be "a step in any progress of the understanding of physics". Even ideas that are eventually rejected as false, ar... (read more)

I agree that the term mindfulness can be vauge and that it is a recent construction of Western culture. However, that doesn't mean it lacks any content or that we can't make accurate generalizations about it.

To be precise, when I say "mindfulness meditation" I have in mind a family of meditation techniques adapted from Theravada and Zen Buddism for secular Western audiences originally by Jon Kabat-Zinn. These techniques attempt to train the mind in adopt a focused, non-judgemental, observational stance. Such a stance is very useful for ... (read more)

I agree about mindfulness meditation. It is presented as a one-size-fits-all solution, but actually mindfulness meditation is just a knob that emphasizes certain neural pathways at the expense of others. In general, as you say, I've found that mindfulness de-emphasizes agential and narrative modes of understanding. Tulpa work, spirit summoning, shammanism, etc. all move the brain in the opposite direction, activating strongly the narrative/agential/relational faculties. I experienced a traumatic dissociative state after too much vipassana meditation on retreat, and I found that working with imaginal entities really helped bring my system back into balance.

I have often thought that the greatest problem with the tulpa discourse is the tendency there to insist on the tulpa's sharp boundaries and literal agenthood. I find it's much more helpful to think of such things in terms of a broader class of imaginal entities which are semi agential and which often have fuzzy boundaries. The concept of a "spirit" in Western magick is a lot more flexible and in many ways more helpful. Of course, this can be taken in an overly literal or implausibly supernateralistic direction, but if we guard against such interpretations,

Interesting, can you give some examples to illustrate how causal/Bayes nets are used to aid reasoning / discovery?

I see merit in the idea that semantic networks may focus too much on the structure of language, and not enough on the structure of the underlying domain being modelled. As active thinkers, we are looking to build an understanding of the domain, not an understanding of how we talked about that domain.

Issues of language use, such as avoiding ambiguity, could sometimes be useful especially in more abstract argumentation, but more important is being able to track all of the relationships among the domain specific entities and organizing lines of evidence.

Got it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_mapping

Good hypothesis, here is why I don't think it's likely to be true.

It seems to me that when humans make explicit arguments with written language, we are doing a natural language form of knowledge representation. In science and philosophy the process of making conceptual models explicit is very useful for theory formulation and evaluation. i.e., In conceptual domains, human thinkers don't learn like today's neural nets, we don't just immerse ourselves in a sea of raw numbers and absorb the correlations. We might do something like th... (read more)