Beyond a certain point, the “regenerate if deleted?” metric becomes useless. For example, if your entire source code is “0″, well, everything’s been deleted, but there’s no way it’s growing back. There has to be somewhere to start. (Related: Where recursive justification hits bottom)
Still, you can characterize epistemic states by how much they could recover, from how deep a deletion, which was one point of the Truly Part of You article. I can imagine simpler epistemic states, lacking knowledge of the scientific method, that could recover Bayesian rationality: you would need to recognize that primitive-future has dynamics very close to primitive-past (where primitive-X denotes the inborn, intuitive understanding of X), which gives you induction, and, combined with basic numeracy, could point you in the right direction.
That was my main problem with the definition of stage 3 and was why I posted my original comment. It seemed to me that you could apply stage 3 to parts of your knowledge but not for everything.
When I read ‘This stage should be the goal of all rationalists.’ (in the original post) I was confused because it seemed to me that stage 3 was unreachable. I mean, if I started with only my human psychology, my senses and the world around me (i.e. the level of a caveman) I don’t think I would invent math, physics,… Stage 3 seemed reachable if I assumed infinite time & persistence and scientific reasoning.
Beyond a certain point, the “regenerate if deleted?” metric becomes useless. For example, if your entire source code is “0″, well, everything’s been deleted, but there’s no way it’s growing back. There has to be somewhere to start. (Related: Where recursive justification hits bottom)
Still, you can characterize epistemic states by how much they could recover, from how deep a deletion, which was one point of the Truly Part of You article. I can imagine simpler epistemic states, lacking knowledge of the scientific method, that could recover Bayesian rationality: you would need to recognize that primitive-future has dynamics very close to primitive-past (where primitive-X denotes the inborn, intuitive understanding of X), which gives you induction, and, combined with basic numeracy, could point you in the right direction.
That was my main problem with the definition of stage 3 and was why I posted my original comment. It seemed to me that you could apply stage 3 to parts of your knowledge but not for everything.
When I read ‘This stage should be the goal of all rationalists.’ (in the original post) I was confused because it seemed to me that stage 3 was unreachable. I mean, if I started with only my human psychology, my senses and the world around me (i.e. the level of a caveman) I don’t think I would invent math, physics,… Stage 3 seemed reachable if I assumed infinite time & persistence and scientific reasoning.