Ok, everyone. LessWrong has now descended to actually arguing over the Kolmogorov complexity of the Christian God, as if this was a serious question. The Slate Star Codex readers demanding “charity” for this, that, and everything else have taken over.
LessWrong is now officially a branch of /r/philosophy. The site is dead, and everyone who actually wanted LessWrongian things can now migrate somewhere else.
LessWrong has now descended to actually arguing over the Kolmogorov complexity of the Christian God, as if this was a serious question.
Well, there is a lot of motivated cognition on that topic (relevant disclaimer, I’m an atheist in the conventional sense of the word) and it seems deceptively straight forward to answer (mostly by KC-dabblers), but it is in fact anything but. The non-triviality arises from technical considerations, not some philosophical obscurantism.
This may be the wrong comment chain to get into it, and your grandstanding doesn’t exactly signal an immediate willingness to engage in medias res, so I won’t elaborate for the moment (unless you want me to).
The non-triviality arises from technical considerations
The laws of physics as we know them are very simple, and we believe that they may actually be even simpler. Meanwhile, a mind existing outside of physics is somehow a more consistent and simple explanation than humans having hardware in the brain that promotes hypotheses involving human-like agents behind everything, which explains away every religion ever? Minds are not simpler than physics. This is not a technical controversy.
Go on and elaborate, but unless you can show some very thorough technical considerations, I just don’t see how you’re able to claim a mind has low Kolmogorov complexity.
“Mind” is a high level concept, on a base level it is just a subset of specific physical structures. The precise arrangement of water molecules in a waterfall, over time, matches if not dwarves the KC of a mind.
That is, if you wanted to recreate precisely this or that waterfall as it precisely happened (with the orientation of each water molecule preserved with high fidelity), the strict computational complexity would be way higher than for a comparatively more ordered and static mind.
The data doesn’t care what importance you ascribe to it. It’s not as if, say, “power”, automatically comes with “hard to describe computationally”. On the contrary, allowing for a function to do arbitrary code changes is easier to implement that defining precise power limitations (see constraining an AI’s utility function).
Then there’s the sheer number of mind-phenomena, are you suggesting adding one by necessity increases complexity? In fact, removing one can increase it as well: If I were to describe a reality in which ceteris is paribus, with the exception of your mind not actually being a mind, then by removing a mind I would have increased overall complexity. Not even taking into account that there are plenty of mind-templates around already (implicitly, since KC, even though uncomputable, is optimal), and that for complexity considerations, adding another of a template isn’t even adding much, necessarily (I’m aware that adding just a few bits already comes with a steep penalty, this comment isn’t meant to be exhaustive). See also the alphabet example further on.
Then there’s the illusion that somehow our universe is of low complexity just because the physical laws governing the transition between time-steps are simple. That is mistaken. If we just look at the laws, and start with a big bang that is not precisely informationally described, we get a multiverse host of possible universes with our universe not in the beginning, which goes counter the KC demands. You may say “I don’t care, as long as our universe is somewhere in the output, that’s fine”. But then I propose an even simpler theory of everything: Output a long enough sequence of Pi, and you eventually get our universe somewhere down the line as well. So our universe’s actual complexity is enourmous, down to atoms in a stone on a hill on some moon somewhere in the next galaxy. There exists a clear trade-off between explanatory power and conciseness. I used to link an old Hutter lecture on that latter topic a few years ago, I can dig it out if you’d like. (ETA: See for example the paragraph labeled “A” on page 6 in this paper of his).
The old argument that |”universe + mind”| > |”universe”| is simplistic and ill-applied. Unlike with probabilities, the sequence ABCDABCDABCDABCD can be less complex than ABCDABCDABCDABC.
The list goes on, if you want to focus on some aspect of it we can go into greater depth on that. Bottom line is, if there’s a slam dunk case, I don’t see it.
Because rationality isn’t about following reason where it takes you, it’s about sticking as dogmatically as possible to the 39 articles of lwrationality as laid down in the seq-tures.
Rationality is indeed about following reason where it takes you. This is very different from following wherever someone would have their feelings hurt if you didn’t go. Of course, rationality also involves the use of priors, evidence, and accumulated information over your entire lifetime. You are not merely allowed but required to assign a very low prior, in the range of “bloody ridiculous”, to propositions which contradict all your available information, or require some massively complex rationalization to be compatible with all your available information.
his is very different from following wherever someone would have their feelings hurt if you didn’t go.
What did you have in mind specifically?
Of course, rationality also involves the use of priors, evidence, and accumulated information over your entire lifetime.
Rationality also involves paradigm shifts, revolutions and inversions. “Use priors” is not, should not be, a call for fundamental conservatism.
You are not merely allowed but required to assign a very low prior, in the range of “bloody ridiculous”, to propositions which contradict all your available information, or require some massively complex rationalization to be compatible with all your available information.
One person’s complex rationalisation is another’s paradigm shift.
Evolution, relativity and quantum physics are paradigm shifts. Some people still aren’t aboard with some of them, finding them against “logic”, “reason”, “common sense”, etc. The self-professed rationalist Ayn Rand rejected all three: do you want to be another Ayn Rand?
The conservative incremental paradigm, applied retroactivley, would lead lwrationalists to reject good science. So they kind of don’t believe in it as the only paradigm. But they also kind of do, since it is the only paradigm they use when discussing theology., or other things they don’t like.
Evolution, relativity and quantum physics are paradigm shifts.
Not sure what “paradigm shift” is supposed to mean, but it sounds to me like “nobody had the slightest suspicion, then came a prophet, told something completely unexpected, and everyone’s mind was blown”. Well, if it is supposed to be anything like that, then evolution and relativity are poor examples (not completely sure about quantum physics).
With evolution, people already had millenia of experience with breeding. Darwin’s new idea was, essentially: “if human breeders can achieve some changes by selecting individuals with certain traits… couldn’t the forces of nature, by automatically selecting individuals who have a greater chance to survive or a greater chance to reproduce, have ultimately a similar effect on the species?”
With relativity, people already had many equations, already did the experiments that disproved the aether, etc. A large part of the puzzle was already known, Einstein “only” had to connect a few pieces together in a creative way. And then it was experimentally tested and confirmed.
By “paradigm shift”, I mean a certain amount of unlearning, overturning previously established beliefs—the fixity of species ion the case of evolution, absolute simultaneity in the case of relativity, determinism in the case of quantum mechanics.
ETA:
You are not merely allowed but required to assign a very low prior, in the range of “bloody ridiculous”, to propositions which contradict all your available information, or require some massively complex rationalization to be compatible with all your available information.
Note the contradicitions to “available information” listed above.
Ok, everyone. LessWrong has now descended to actually arguing over the Kolmogorov complexity of the Christian God, as if this was a serious question. The Slate Star Codex readers demanding “charity” for this, that, and everything else have taken over.
LessWrong is now officially a branch of /r/philosophy. The site is dead, and everyone who actually wanted LessWrongian things can now migrate somewhere else.
Of blessed memory, 2008-2015.
Two or three people confused about K-complexity doesn’t herald the death of LW.
Well, there is a lot of motivated cognition on that topic (relevant disclaimer, I’m an atheist in the conventional sense of the word) and it seems deceptively straight forward to answer (mostly by KC-dabblers), but it is in fact anything but. The non-triviality arises from technical considerations, not some philosophical obscurantism.
This may be the wrong comment chain to get into it, and your grandstanding doesn’t exactly signal an immediate willingness to engage in medias res, so I won’t elaborate for the moment (unless you want me to).
The laws of physics as we know them are very simple, and we believe that they may actually be even simpler. Meanwhile, a mind existing outside of physics is somehow a more consistent and simple explanation than humans having hardware in the brain that promotes hypotheses involving human-like agents behind everything, which explains away every religion ever? Minds are not simpler than physics. This is not a technical controversy.
Go on and elaborate, but unless you can show some very thorough technical considerations, I just don’t see how you’re able to claim a mind has low Kolmogorov complexity.
“Mind” is a high level concept, on a base level it is just a subset of specific physical structures. The precise arrangement of water molecules in a waterfall, over time, matches if not dwarves the KC of a mind.
That is, if you wanted to recreate precisely this or that waterfall as it precisely happened (with the orientation of each water molecule preserved with high fidelity), the strict computational complexity would be way higher than for a comparatively more ordered and static mind.
The data doesn’t care what importance you ascribe to it. It’s not as if, say, “power”, automatically comes with “hard to describe computationally”. On the contrary, allowing for a function to do arbitrary code changes is easier to implement that defining precise power limitations (see constraining an AI’s utility function).
Then there’s the sheer number of mind-phenomena, are you suggesting adding one by necessity increases complexity? In fact, removing one can increase it as well: If I were to describe a reality in which ceteris is paribus, with the exception of your mind not actually being a mind, then by removing a mind I would have increased overall complexity. Not even taking into account that there are plenty of mind-templates around already (implicitly, since KC, even though uncomputable, is optimal), and that for complexity considerations, adding another of a template isn’t even adding much, necessarily (I’m aware that adding just a few bits already comes with a steep penalty, this comment isn’t meant to be exhaustive). See also the alphabet example further on.
Then there’s the illusion that somehow our universe is of low complexity just because the physical laws governing the transition between time-steps are simple. That is mistaken. If we just look at the laws, and start with a big bang that is not precisely informationally described, we get a multiverse host of possible universes with our universe not in the beginning, which goes counter the KC demands. You may say “I don’t care, as long as our universe is somewhere in the output, that’s fine”. But then I propose an even simpler theory of everything: Output a long enough sequence of Pi, and you eventually get our universe somewhere down the line as well. So our universe’s actual complexity is enourmous, down to atoms in a stone on a hill on some moon somewhere in the next galaxy. There exists a clear trade-off between explanatory power and conciseness. I used to link an old Hutter lecture on that latter topic a few years ago, I can dig it out if you’d like. (ETA: See for example the paragraph labeled “A” on page 6 in this paper of his).
The old argument that |”universe + mind”| > |”universe”| is simplistic and ill-applied. Unlike with probabilities, the sequence ABCDABCDABCDABCD can be less complex than ABCDABCDABCDABC.
The list goes on, if you want to focus on some aspect of it we can go into greater depth on that. Bottom line is, if there’s a slam dunk case, I don’t see it.
Because rationality isn’t about following reason where it takes you, it’s about sticking as dogmatically as possible to the 39 articles of lwrationality as laid down in the seq-tures.
Rationality is indeed about following reason where it takes you. This is very different from following wherever someone would have their feelings hurt if you didn’t go. Of course, rationality also involves the use of priors, evidence, and accumulated information over your entire lifetime. You are not merely allowed but required to assign a very low prior, in the range of “bloody ridiculous”, to propositions which contradict all your available information, or require some massively complex rationalization to be compatible with all your available information.
What did you have in mind specifically?
Rationality also involves paradigm shifts, revolutions and inversions. “Use priors” is not, should not be, a call for fundamental conservatism.
One person’s complex rationalisation is another’s paradigm shift.
Evolution, relativity and quantum physics are paradigm shifts. Some people still aren’t aboard with some of them, finding them against “logic”, “reason”, “common sense”, etc. The self-professed rationalist Ayn Rand rejected all three: do you want to be another Ayn Rand?
The conservative incremental paradigm, applied retroactivley, would lead lwrationalists to reject good science. So they kind of don’t believe in it as the only paradigm. But they also kind of do, since it is the only paradigm they use when discussing theology., or other things they don’t like.
Not sure what “paradigm shift” is supposed to mean, but it sounds to me like “nobody had the slightest suspicion, then came a prophet, told something completely unexpected, and everyone’s mind was blown”. Well, if it is supposed to be anything like that, then evolution and relativity are poor examples (not completely sure about quantum physics).
With evolution, people already had millenia of experience with breeding. Darwin’s new idea was, essentially: “if human breeders can achieve some changes by selecting individuals with certain traits… couldn’t the forces of nature, by automatically selecting individuals who have a greater chance to survive or a greater chance to reproduce, have ultimately a similar effect on the species?”
With relativity, people already had many equations, already did the experiments that disproved the aether, etc. A large part of the puzzle was already known, Einstein “only” had to connect a few pieces together in a creative way. And then it was experimentally tested and confirmed.
By “paradigm shift”, I mean a certain amount of unlearning, overturning previously established beliefs—the fixity of species ion the case of evolution, absolute simultaneity in the case of relativity, determinism in the case of quantum mechanics.
ETA:
Note the contradicitions to “available information” listed above.