It sounds like you’re using very different expectations for those questions, as opposed to the very rigorous interrogation of base reality. ‘Does Santa exist?’ and ‘does that chair exist?’ are questions which (implicitly, at least) are part of a system of questions like ‘what happens if I set trip mines in my chimney tonight?’ and ‘if I try to sit down, will I fall on my ass?’ which have consequences in terms of sensory input and feedback. You can respond ‘yes’ to the former, if you’re trying to preserve a child’s belief in Santa (although I contend that’s a lie) and you can truthfully answer ‘no’ to the latter if you want to talk about an investigation of base reality.
Of course, if you answer ‘no’ to ‘does that chair exist?’ your interlocutor will give you a contemptful look, because that wasn’t the question they were asking, and you knew that, and you chose to answer a different question anyway.
I choose to think of this as different levels of resolution, or as varying bucket widths on a histograph. To the question ‘does Jupiter orbit the Sun?’ you can productively answer ‘yes’ if you’re giving an elementary school class a basic lesson on the structure of the solar system. But if you’re trying to slingshot a satellite around Ganymede, the answer is going to be no, because the Solar-Jovian barycenter is way outside the solar corona, and at the level you’re operating, that’s actually relevant.
Most people don’t use the words ‘reality’ or ‘exist’ in the way we’re using it here, not because people are idiots, but because they don’t have a coherent existential base for non-idiocy, and because it’s hard to justify the importance of those questions when you spend your whole life in sensory reality.
As to the aliens, well, if they don’t distinguish between base level reality and abstractions, they can make plenty of good sensory predictions in day-to-day life, but they may run into some issues trying to make predictions in high-energy physics. If they manage to do both well, it sounds like they’re doing a good job operating across multiple levels of resolution. I confess I don’t have a strong grasp on the subject, or on the differences between a model being real versus not being real in terms of base reality, I’m gonna wait on JBlack’s response to that.
I generally agree with the content of the articles you linked, and that there are different notions of “really exist”. The issue is, I’m still not sure what “base-level reality” means. JBlack said it was what “really exists”, but since JBlack seems to be using a notion of “what really exists” that’s different from the one people normally use, I’m not really sure what it means.
In the end, you can choose to define “what really exists” or “base-level reality” however you want, but I’m still wondering about what people normally take them to mean.
I try to avoid using the word ‘really’ for this sort of reason. Gets you into all sorts of trouble.
(a) JBlack is using a definition related to simulation theory, and I don’t know enough about this to speculate too much, but it seems to rely on a hard discontinuity between base and sensory reality.
(b) Before I realized he was using it that way, I thought the phrase meant ‘reality as expressed on the most basic level yet conceivable’ which, if it is possible to understand it, explodes the abstractions of higher orders and possibly results in their dissolving into absurdity. This is a softer transition than the above.
(c) I figure most people use ‘really exist’ to refer to material sensory reality as opposed to ideas. This chair exists, the Platonic Idea of a chair does not. The rule with this sort of assumption is ‘if I can touch it, or it can touch me, it exists’ for a suitably broad understanding of ‘touch.’
(d) I’ve heard some people claim that the only things that ‘really exist’ are those you can prove with mathematics or deduction, and mere material reality is a frivolity.
(e) I know some religious people believe heavily in the primacy of God (or whichever concept you want to insert here) and regard the material world as illusory, and that the afterlife is the ‘true’ world. You can see this idea everywhere from the Kalachakra mandala to the last chapter of the Screwtape letters.
I guess the one thing uniting all these is that, if it were possible to take a true Outside View, this is what you would see; a Platonic World of ideas, or a purely material universe, or a marble held in the palm of God, or a mass of vibrating strings (or whatever the cool kids in quantum physics are thinking these days) or a huge simulation of any of the above instantiated on any of the above.
I think most people think in terms of option c, because it fits really easily into a modern materialist worldview, but the prevalence of e shouldn’t be downplayed. I’ve probably missed some important ones.
It sounds like you’re using very different expectations for those questions, as opposed to the very rigorous interrogation of base reality. ‘Does Santa exist?’ and ‘does that chair exist?’ are questions which (implicitly, at least) are part of a system of questions like ‘what happens if I set trip mines in my chimney tonight?’ and ‘if I try to sit down, will I fall on my ass?’ which have consequences in terms of sensory input and feedback. You can respond ‘yes’ to the former, if you’re trying to preserve a child’s belief in Santa (although I contend that’s a lie) and you can truthfully answer ‘no’ to the latter if you want to talk about an investigation of base reality.
Of course, if you answer ‘no’ to ‘does that chair exist?’ your interlocutor will give you a contemptful look, because that wasn’t the question they were asking, and you knew that, and you chose to answer a different question anyway.
I choose to think of this as different levels of resolution, or as varying bucket widths on a histograph. To the question ‘does Jupiter orbit the Sun?’ you can productively answer ‘yes’ if you’re giving an elementary school class a basic lesson on the structure of the solar system. But if you’re trying to slingshot a satellite around Ganymede, the answer is going to be no, because the Solar-Jovian barycenter is way outside the solar corona, and at the level you’re operating, that’s actually relevant.
Most people don’t use the words ‘reality’ or ‘exist’ in the way we’re using it here, not because people are idiots, but because they don’t have a coherent existential base for non-idiocy, and because it’s hard to justify the importance of those questions when you spend your whole life in sensory reality.
As to the aliens, well, if they don’t distinguish between base level reality and abstractions, they can make plenty of good sensory predictions in day-to-day life, but they may run into some issues trying to make predictions in high-energy physics. If they manage to do both well, it sounds like they’re doing a good job operating across multiple levels of resolution. I confess I don’t have a strong grasp on the subject, or on the differences between a model being real versus not being real in terms of base reality, I’m gonna wait on JBlack’s response to that.
Relevant links (which you’ve probably already read):
How an Algorithm Feels From the Inside, Eliezer Yudkowsky
The Categories Were Made for Man, not Man for the Categories, Scott Alexander
Ontological Remodeling, David Chapman
The correctness of that post has been disputed; for an extended rebuttal, see “Where to Draw the Boundaries?” and “Unnatural Categories Are Optimized for Deception”.
Thanks Zack!
I generally agree with the content of the articles you linked, and that there are different notions of “really exist”. The issue is, I’m still not sure what “base-level reality” means. JBlack said it was what “really exists”, but since JBlack seems to be using a notion of “what really exists” that’s different from the one people normally use, I’m not really sure what it means.
In the end, you can choose to define “what really exists” or “base-level reality” however you want, but I’m still wondering about what people normally take them to mean.
I try to avoid using the word ‘really’ for this sort of reason. Gets you into all sorts of trouble.
(a) JBlack is using a definition related to simulation theory, and I don’t know enough about this to speculate too much, but it seems to rely on a hard discontinuity between base and sensory reality.
(b) Before I realized he was using it that way, I thought the phrase meant ‘reality as expressed on the most basic level yet conceivable’ which, if it is possible to understand it, explodes the abstractions of higher orders and possibly results in their dissolving into absurdity. This is a softer transition than the above.
(c) I figure most people use ‘really exist’ to refer to material sensory reality as opposed to ideas. This chair exists, the Platonic Idea of a chair does not. The rule with this sort of assumption is ‘if I can touch it, or it can touch me, it exists’ for a suitably broad understanding of ‘touch.’
(d) I’ve heard some people claim that the only things that ‘really exist’ are those you can prove with mathematics or deduction, and mere material reality is a frivolity.
(e) I know some religious people believe heavily in the primacy of God (or whichever concept you want to insert here) and regard the material world as illusory, and that the afterlife is the ‘true’ world. You can see this idea everywhere from the Kalachakra mandala to the last chapter of the Screwtape letters.
I guess the one thing uniting all these is that, if it were possible to take a true Outside View, this is what you would see; a Platonic World of ideas, or a purely material universe, or a marble held in the palm of God, or a mass of vibrating strings (or whatever the cool kids in quantum physics are thinking these days) or a huge simulation of any of the above instantiated on any of the above.
I think most people think in terms of option c, because it fits really easily into a modern materialist worldview, but the prevalence of e shouldn’t be downplayed. I’ve probably missed some important ones.