A theory of mind that can actually do the work needs to build up the same sort of kernel evolution and culture have set up for people. For the human ballpark estimate, you’d have to fill something like 100 000 pages with math, all setting up the basic machinery you need for the mind to get going. A very abstracted out theory of mind could no doubt cut off an order of magnitude or two out of that, but something like Maxwell’s equations on a single sheet of paper won’t do. It isn’t answering the question of how you’d tell a computer how to be a mind, and that’s the question I keep looking at this stuff with.
You want a sweater. I give you a baby sheep, and it is the only baby sheep you have ever seen that is not completely lame or retarded. You need wool to produce the sweater, so why are you disappointed? Look, the mathematical part of the theory is something we wrote less than a week ago, and it is already better than any theory of this type I have ever heard of (three or four). The point is not that this would be excruciatingly difficult. The point is that for some reason, almost nobody is doing this. It probably has something to do with the severe stagnation in the field of philosophy. The people who could develop philosophy find the academic discipline so revolting they don’t.
I did not come to LessWrong to tell everyone I have solved the secrets of the universe, or that I am very smart. My ineptitude in math is the greatest single obstacle in my attempts to continue development. If I didn’t know exactly one person who is good at math and wants to do this kind of work with me, I might be in an insane asylum, but no more about that. I came here because this is my life… and even though I greatly value the MOQ community, everyone on those mailing lists is apparently even less proficient in maths and logic as I am. Maybe someone here thinks this is fun and wants to have a fun creative process with me.
I would like to write a few of those 100 000 pages that we need. I don’t get your point. You seem to require me to have written them before I have written them.
My confusion about the assumptions is basically that I get the sense that analytic philosophers seem to operate like they could just write the name of some complex human concept, like “morality”, then throw in some math notation like modal logic, quantified formulas and set memberships, and call it a day. But what I’m expecting is something that teaches me how to program a computer to do mind-stuff, and a computer won’t have the corresponding mental concept for the word “morality” like a human has, since the human has the ~200M special sauce kernel which gives them that. And I hardly ever see philosophers talking about this bit.
Do you expect to build the digital sauce kernel without any kind of a plan—not even a tentative one? If not, a few pages of extremely abstract formulae is all I have now, and frankly, I’m not happy about that either. I can’t teach you nearly anything you seem interested of, but I could really use some discussion with interested people. And you have already been helpful. You don’t need to consider me someone who is aggressively imposing his views on individual people. I would love to find people who are interested of these things because there are so few of them.
I had a hard time figuring out what you mean by basic assumptions, because I’ve been doing this for such a long time I tend to forget what kind of metaphysical assumptions are generally held by people who like science but are disinterested of metaphysics. I think I’ve now caught up with you. Here are some basic assumptions.
RP is about definable things. It is not supposed to make statements about undefinable things—not even that they don’t exist, like you would seem to believe.
Humans are before anthropology in RP. The former is in O2 and the latter in O4. I didn’t know how to tell you that because I didn’t know you wanted to hear that and not some other part of the theory in order to not go whaaa. I’d need to tell you everything but that would involve a lot of metaphysics. But the theory is not a theory of the history of the world, if “world” is something that begins with the Big Bang.
From your empirical scientific point of view, I suppose it would be correct to state that RP is a theory of how the self-conscious part of one person evolves during his lifetime.
At least in the current simple isntance of RP, you don’t need to know anything about the metaphysical content to understand the math. You don’t need to go out of math-mode, because there are no nonstandard metaphysical concepts among the formulae.
If you do go out of the math mode and want to know what the symbols stand foor, I think that’s very good. But this can only be explained to you in terms of metaphysics, because empirical science simply does not account for everything you experience. Suppose you stop by in the grocery store. Where’s the empirical theory that accounts for that? Maybe some general sociological theory would. But my point is, no such empirical theory is actually implemented. You don’t acquire a scientific explanation for the things you did in the store. Still you remember them. You experienced them. They exist in your self-conscious mind in some way, which is not dependent of your conceptions of what is the relationship between topology and model theory, or of your understanding of why fission of iron does not produce energy, or how one investor could single-handedly significantly affect whether a country joins the Euro. From your personal, what you might perhaps call “subjective”, point of view, it does not even depend on your conception of cognition science, unless you actually apply that knowledge to it. You probably don’t do that all the time although you do that sometimes.
I don’t subscribe to any kind of “subjectivism”, whatever that might be in this context, or idealism, in the sense that something like that would be “true” in a meaningful way. But you might agree that when trying to develop the theory underlying self-conscious phenomenal and abstract experience, you can’t begin from the Big Bang, because you weren’t there.
You could use RP to describe a world you experience in a dream, and the explanation would work as well as when you are awake. Physical theories don’t work in that world. For example, if you look at your watch in a dream, then look away, and look at it again, the watch may display a completely different time. Or the watch may function, but when you take it apart, you find that instead of clockwork, it contains something a functioning mechanical watch will not contain, such as coins.
RP is intended to relate abstract thought (O, N, S) to sensory perceptions, emotions and actions (R), but to define all relations between abstract entities to other abstract entities recursively.
One difference between RP and the empiric theories of cosmology and such, that you mentioned, is that the latter will not describe the ability of person X to conceptualize his own cognitive processess in a way that can actually be used right now to describe what, or rather, how, some person is thinking with respect to abstract concepts. RP does that.
RP can be used to estimate the metaphysical composure of other people. You seem to place most of the questions you label “metaphysical” or “philosophical” in O.
I don’t yet know if this forum tolerates much metaphysical discussion, but my theory is based on about six years of work on the Metaphysics of Quality. That is not mainstream philosophy and I don’t know how people here will perceive it. I have altered the MOQ a lot. It’s latest “authorized” variant in 1991 decisively included mostly just the O patterns. Analyzing the theory was very difficult for me in general. But maybe I will confuse people if I say nothing about the metaphysical side. So I’ll think what to say...
RP is not an instance of relativism (except in the Buddhist sense), absolutism, determinism, indeterminism, realism, antirealism or solipsism. Also, I consider all those theories to be some kind figures of speech, because I can’t find any use for them except to illustrate a certain point in a certain discussion in a metaphorical fashion. In logical analysis, these concepts do not necessarily retain the same meaning when they are used again in another discussion. These concepts acquire definable meaning only when detached from the philosophical use and being placed within a specific context.
Structurally RP resembles what I believe computer scientists call context-free languages, or programming languages with dynamic typing. I am not yet sure what is the exact definition of the former, but having written a few programs, I do understand what it means to do typing run-time. The Western mainstream philosophical tradition does not seem to include any theories that would be analogues of these computer science topics.
I have read GEB but don’t remember much. I’ll recap what a quine is. I tend to need to discuss mathematical things with someone face to face before I understand them, which slows down progress.
The cat/line thing is not very relevant, but apparently I didn’t remember the experiment right. However, if the person and the robot could not see the lines at the same time for some reason—such as the robot needing to operate the scanner and thus not seeing inside the scanner—the robot could alter the person’s brain to produce a very strong response to parallel lines in order to verify that the screen inside the scanner, which displays the lines, does not malfunction, is not unplugged, the person is not blind, etc. There could be more efficient ways of finding such things out, but if the robot has replaceable hardware and can thus live indefinitely, it has all the time in the world...
You want a sweater. I give you a baby sheep, and it is the only baby sheep you have ever seen that is not completely lame or retarded. You need wool to produce the sweater, so why are you disappointed? Look, the mathematical part of the theory is something we wrote less than a week ago, and it is already better than any theory of this type I have ever heard of (three or four). The point is not that this would be excruciatingly difficult. The point is that for some reason, almost nobody is doing this. It probably has something to do with the severe stagnation in the field of philosophy. The people who could develop philosophy find the academic discipline so revolting they don’t.
I did not come to LessWrong to tell everyone I have solved the secrets of the universe, or that I am very smart. My ineptitude in math is the greatest single obstacle in my attempts to continue development. If I didn’t know exactly one person who is good at math and wants to do this kind of work with me, I might be in an insane asylum, but no more about that. I came here because this is my life… and even though I greatly value the MOQ community, everyone on those mailing lists is apparently even less proficient in maths and logic as I am. Maybe someone here thinks this is fun and wants to have a fun creative process with me.
I would like to write a few of those 100 000 pages that we need. I don’t get your point. You seem to require me to have written them before I have written them.
Do you expect to build the digital sauce kernel without any kind of a plan—not even a tentative one? If not, a few pages of extremely abstract formulae is all I have now, and frankly, I’m not happy about that either. I can’t teach you nearly anything you seem interested of, but I could really use some discussion with interested people. And you have already been helpful. You don’t need to consider me someone who is aggressively imposing his views on individual people. I would love to find people who are interested of these things because there are so few of them.
I had a hard time figuring out what you mean by basic assumptions, because I’ve been doing this for such a long time I tend to forget what kind of metaphysical assumptions are generally held by people who like science but are disinterested of metaphysics. I think I’ve now caught up with you. Here are some basic assumptions.
RP is about definable things. It is not supposed to make statements about undefinable things—not even that they don’t exist, like you would seem to believe.
Humans are before anthropology in RP. The former is in O2 and the latter in O4. I didn’t know how to tell you that because I didn’t know you wanted to hear that and not some other part of the theory in order to not go whaaa. I’d need to tell you everything but that would involve a lot of metaphysics. But the theory is not a theory of the history of the world, if “world” is something that begins with the Big Bang.
From your empirical scientific point of view, I suppose it would be correct to state that RP is a theory of how the self-conscious part of one person evolves during his lifetime.
At least in the current simple isntance of RP, you don’t need to know anything about the metaphysical content to understand the math. You don’t need to go out of math-mode, because there are no nonstandard metaphysical concepts among the formulae.
If you do go out of the math mode and want to know what the symbols stand foor, I think that’s very good. But this can only be explained to you in terms of metaphysics, because empirical science simply does not account for everything you experience. Suppose you stop by in the grocery store. Where’s the empirical theory that accounts for that? Maybe some general sociological theory would. But my point is, no such empirical theory is actually implemented. You don’t acquire a scientific explanation for the things you did in the store. Still you remember them. You experienced them. They exist in your self-conscious mind in some way, which is not dependent of your conceptions of what is the relationship between topology and model theory, or of your understanding of why fission of iron does not produce energy, or how one investor could single-handedly significantly affect whether a country joins the Euro. From your personal, what you might perhaps call “subjective”, point of view, it does not even depend on your conception of cognition science, unless you actually apply that knowledge to it. You probably don’t do that all the time although you do that sometimes.
I don’t subscribe to any kind of “subjectivism”, whatever that might be in this context, or idealism, in the sense that something like that would be “true” in a meaningful way. But you might agree that when trying to develop the theory underlying self-conscious phenomenal and abstract experience, you can’t begin from the Big Bang, because you weren’t there.
You could use RP to describe a world you experience in a dream, and the explanation would work as well as when you are awake. Physical theories don’t work in that world. For example, if you look at your watch in a dream, then look away, and look at it again, the watch may display a completely different time. Or the watch may function, but when you take it apart, you find that instead of clockwork, it contains something a functioning mechanical watch will not contain, such as coins.
RP is intended to relate abstract thought (O, N, S) to sensory perceptions, emotions and actions (R), but to define all relations between abstract entities to other abstract entities recursively.
One difference between RP and the empiric theories of cosmology and such, that you mentioned, is that the latter will not describe the ability of person X to conceptualize his own cognitive processess in a way that can actually be used right now to describe what, or rather, how, some person is thinking with respect to abstract concepts. RP does that.
RP can be used to estimate the metaphysical composure of other people. You seem to place most of the questions you label “metaphysical” or “philosophical” in O.
I don’t yet know if this forum tolerates much metaphysical discussion, but my theory is based on about six years of work on the Metaphysics of Quality. That is not mainstream philosophy and I don’t know how people here will perceive it. I have altered the MOQ a lot. It’s latest “authorized” variant in 1991 decisively included mostly just the O patterns. Analyzing the theory was very difficult for me in general. But maybe I will confuse people if I say nothing about the metaphysical side. So I’ll think what to say...
RP is not an instance of relativism (except in the Buddhist sense), absolutism, determinism, indeterminism, realism, antirealism or solipsism. Also, I consider all those theories to be some kind figures of speech, because I can’t find any use for them except to illustrate a certain point in a certain discussion in a metaphorical fashion. In logical analysis, these concepts do not necessarily retain the same meaning when they are used again in another discussion. These concepts acquire definable meaning only when detached from the philosophical use and being placed within a specific context.
Structurally RP resembles what I believe computer scientists call context-free languages, or programming languages with dynamic typing. I am not yet sure what is the exact definition of the former, but having written a few programs, I do understand what it means to do typing run-time. The Western mainstream philosophical tradition does not seem to include any theories that would be analogues of these computer science topics.
I have read GEB but don’t remember much. I’ll recap what a quine is. I tend to need to discuss mathematical things with someone face to face before I understand them, which slows down progress.
The cat/line thing is not very relevant, but apparently I didn’t remember the experiment right. However, if the person and the robot could not see the lines at the same time for some reason—such as the robot needing to operate the scanner and thus not seeing inside the scanner—the robot could alter the person’s brain to produce a very strong response to parallel lines in order to verify that the screen inside the scanner, which displays the lines, does not malfunction, is not unplugged, the person is not blind, etc. There could be more efficient ways of finding such things out, but if the robot has replaceable hardware and can thus live indefinitely, it has all the time in the world...