To be clear, there are two different but related points that I’ve tried to make here in the last few posts.
Point 1 is a minor point about the Rationalist’s Taboo game:
With regard to this point, as I’ve stated already, the task was to give a reductive explanation of the concept of possibility by explaining it in terms of more fundamental concepts (i.e., concepts which have nothing to do with possibility or associated concepts, even implicitly). I think that Eliezer failed that by sneaking the concept of “possibile to be reached” (i.e., “reachable”) into his explanation (note that what we call that concept is irrelevant, reachable or fizzbin or whatever).
Point 2 is a related but slightly different point about whether state-space searching is a helpful way of thinking about possibility and whether it actually explains anything.
I think I should summarize what I think Eliezer’s thesis is first so that other people can correct me (Eliezer said he is “done explaining” anything to me, so perhaps others who think they understand him well would speak up if they understand his thesis differently).
Thesis: regarding some phenomenon as possible is nothing other than the inner perception a person experiences (and probably also the memory of such a perception in the past) after mentally running something like the search algorithm and determining that the phenomenon is reachable.
Is this substantially correct?
The problem I have with that position is that when we dig a little deeper and ask what it means for a state to be reachable, the answer circularly depends on the concept of possibility, which is what we are supposedly explaining. A reachable state is just a state that it is possible to reach. If you don’t want to talk about reaching, call it transitioning or changing or whatever. The key point is that the algorithm divides the states (or whatever) into two disjoint sets: the ones it’s possible to get to and the ones it is not possible to get to. What distinguishes these two sets except possibility?
You might say that there is no problem, this possibility is again to be explained in terms of a search (or the result of a search), recursively. But you can’t have an infinite regress, so there must be a base case. The base case might be something hardwired into us, but then that would mean that the thing that is hardwired into us is what possibility really is, and that the sensation of possibility that arises from the search algorithm is just something that depends on our primitive notion of possibility. If the base case isn’t something hardwired into us, it is still necessarily something other than the search algorithm, so again, the search algorithm is not what possibility is.
To be clear, there are two different but related points that I’ve tried to make here in the last few posts.
Point 1 is a minor point about the Rationalist’s Taboo game:
With regard to this point, as I’ve stated already, the task was to give a reductive explanation of the concept of possibility by explaining it in terms of more fundamental concepts (i.e., concepts which have nothing to do with possibility or associated concepts, even implicitly). I think that Eliezer failed that by sneaking the concept of “possibile to be reached” (i.e., “reachable”) into his explanation (note that what we call that concept is irrelevant, reachable or fizzbin or whatever).
Point 2 is a related but slightly different point about whether state-space searching is a helpful way of thinking about possibility and whether it actually explains anything.
I think I should summarize what I think Eliezer’s thesis is first so that other people can correct me (Eliezer said he is “done explaining” anything to me, so perhaps others who think they understand him well would speak up if they understand his thesis differently).
Thesis: regarding some phenomenon as possible is nothing other than the inner perception a person experiences (and probably also the memory of such a perception in the past) after mentally running something like the search algorithm and determining that the phenomenon is reachable.
Is this substantially correct?
The problem I have with that position is that when we dig a little deeper and ask what it means for a state to be reachable, the answer circularly depends on the concept of possibility, which is what we are supposedly explaining. A reachable state is just a state that it is possible to reach. If you don’t want to talk about reaching, call it transitioning or changing or whatever. The key point is that the algorithm divides the states (or whatever) into two disjoint sets: the ones it’s possible to get to and the ones it is not possible to get to. What distinguishes these two sets except possibility?
You might say that there is no problem, this possibility is again to be explained in terms of a search (or the result of a search), recursively. But you can’t have an infinite regress, so there must be a base case. The base case might be something hardwired into us, but then that would mean that the thing that is hardwired into us is what possibility really is, and that the sensation of possibility that arises from the search algorithm is just something that depends on our primitive notion of possibility. If the base case isn’t something hardwired into us, it is still necessarily something other than the search algorithm, so again, the search algorithm is not what possibility is.