Ten years ago, Marcus Hutter made a focused effort to bring philosophers up to speed on Solomonoff induction and AIXI.
They are both pretty underwhelming. Solomonoff Induction doesn’t solve epistemology in one fell swoop, for a number of reasons.
It’s not known that the universe is necessarily computable, it’s not clear that a programme—a list of instructions—can express any ontological hypothesis, and it’s not clear why computational complexity would map onto.probability in the relevant sense.
(b) … there’s a culture of being relaxed, or something to that effect, in philosophy
That is possibly a result of mainstream philosophy being better at meta philosophy… in the sense of more being skeptical. Once you have rejected the idea that you can converge on The One True Epistemology, you have to give up on the “missionary work ” of telling people that they are wrong according to TOTE, and that’s your “relaxation”.
Philosophers are good at coming up with distinctions. They are not good at saying, “the debate about the true meaning of knowledge is inherently silly; let’s collaboratively map out concept space instead.”
If that means giving up on traditional epistemology, it’s not going to help. The thing about traditional terms like “truth” and “knowledge” is that they connect to traditional social moves, like persuasion and agreement. If you can’t put down the tagble stakes of truth and proof, you can’t expect the payoff of agreement.
They are both pretty underwhelming. Solomonoff Induction doesn’t solve epistemology in one fell swoop, for a number of reasons.
It’s not known that the universe is necessarily computable, it’s not clear that a programme—a list of instructions—can express any ontological hypothesis, and it’s not clear why computational complexity would map onto.probability in the relevant sense.
That is possibly a result of mainstream philosophy being better at meta philosophy… in the sense of more being skeptical. Once you have rejected the idea that you can converge on The One True Epistemology, you have to give up on the “missionary work ” of telling people that they are wrong according to TOTE, and that’s your “relaxation”.
If that means giving up on traditional epistemology, it’s not going to help. The thing about traditional terms like “truth” and “knowledge” is that they connect to traditional social moves, like persuasion and agreement. If you can’t put down the tagble stakes of truth and proof, you can’t expect the payoff of agreement.