Recently I have been thinking that we should in fact use “really basic” definitions, EG “knowledge is just mutual information”, and also other things with a general theme of “don’t make agency so complicated”. The hope is to eventually be able to build up to complicated types of knowledge (such as the definition you seek here), but starting with really basic forms. Let me see if I can explain.
First, an ontology is just an agents way of organizing information about the world. These can take lots of forms and I’m not going to constrain it to any particular formalization (but doing so could be part of the research program I’m suggesting).
Second, a third-person perspective is a “view from nowhere” which has the capacity to be rooted at specific locations, recovering first-person perspectives. In other words, I relate subjective and objective in the following way: objectivity is just a mapping from specific “locations” (within the objective perspective) to subjective views “from that location”.
Note that an objective view is not supposed to be necessarily correct; it is just a hypothesis about what the universe looks like, described from the 3rd person perspective.
Notice what I’m doing: I’m defining a 3rd person perspective as a solution to the mind-body problem. Why?
Well, what’s a 3rd-person perspective good for? Why do we invent such things in the first place?
It’s good for communication. I speak of the world in objective terms largely because this is one of the best ways to communicate with others. Rather than having a different word for the front of a car, the side of a car, etc (all the ways I can experience a car), I have “car”, so that I can refer to a car in an experience-agnostic way. Other people understand this language and can translate it to their own experience appropriately.
Similarly, if I say something is “to my left” rather than “left”, other people know how to translate that to their own personal coordinate system.
So far so good.
Now, a reasonable project would be to create as useful a 3rd person perspective as possible. One thing this means is that it should help translate between as many perspectives as possible.
I don’t claim to have a systematic grasp of what that implies, but one obvious thing people do is qualify statements: eg, “I believe X” rather than just stating “X” outright. “I want X” rather than “X should happen”. This communicates information that a broad variety of listeners can accept.
Now, a controversial step. A notion of objectivity needs to decide what counts as a “conscious experiencer” or “potential viewpoint”. That’s because the whole point of a notion of objectivity is to be an ontology which can be mapped into a set of 1st-person viewpoints.
So I propose that we make this as broad as possible. In particular, we should be able to consider the viewpoint of any physical object. (At least.)
This is little baby panpsychism. I’m not claiming that “all physical objects have conscious experiences” in any meaningful sense, but I do want my notion of conscious experience to extend to all physical objects, just because that’s a pretty big boundary I can draw, so that I’m sure I’m not excluding anyone actually important with my definition.
For an object to “experience” an event is for it to, like, “feel some shockwaves” from the event—ie, for there to be mutual information there. On the other hand, for an object to “directly experience” an event could be defined as being contained within the physical space of the event, or perhaps to intersect that physical space, or something along those lines.
For an object to “know about something” in this broad sense is just for there to be mutual information.
For me to think there is knowledge is for my objective model to say that there is mutual information.
These definitions obviously have some problems.
Let’s look at a different type of knowledge, which I will call tacit knowledge—stuff like being able to ride a bike (aka “know-how”). I think this can be defined (following my “very basic” theme) from an object’s ability to participate successfully in patterns. A screw “knows how” to fit in threaded holes of the correct size. It “knows how” to go further in when rotated in one way, and come further out when rotated the other way. Etc.
Now, an object has some kind of learning if it can increase its tacit knowledge (in some sense) through experience. Perhaps we could say something like, it learns for a specified goal predicate if it has a tendency to increase the measure of situations in which it satisfies this goal predicate, through experience? (Mathematically this is a bit vague, sorry.)
Now we can start to think about measuring the extent to which mutual information contributes to learning of tacit knowledge. Something happens to our object. It gains some mutual information w/ external stuff. If this mutual information increases its ability to pursue some goal predicate, we can say that the information is accessible wrt that goal predicate. We can imagine the goal predicate being “active” in the agent, and having a “translation system” whereby it unpacks the mutual information into what it needs.
On the other hand, if I undergo an experience while I’m sleeping, and the mutual information I have with that event is just some small rearrangements of cellular structure which I never notice, then the mutual information is not accessible to any significant goal predicates which my learning tracks.
I don’t think this solves all the problems you want to solve, but it seems to me like a fruitful way of trying to come up with definitions—start with really basic forms of “knowledge” and related things, and try to stack them up to get to the more complex notions.
First, an ontology is just an agents way of organizing information about the world...
Second, a third-person perspective is a “view from nowhere” which has the capacity to be rooted at specific locations...
Yep I’m with you here
Well, what’s a 3rd-person perspective good for? Why do we invent such things in the first place? It’s good for communication.
Yeah I very much agree with justifying the use of 3rd person perspectives on practical grounds.
we should be able to consider the [first person] viewpoint of any physical object.
Well if we are choosing to work with third-person perspectives then maybe we don’t need first person perspectives at all. We can describe gravity and entropy without any first person perspectives at all, for example.
I’m not against first person perspectives, but if we’re working with third person perspectives then we might start by sticking to third person perspectives exclusively.
Let’s look at a different type of knowledge, which I will call tacit knowledge—stuff like being able to ride a bike (aka “know-how”). I think this can be defined (following my “very basic” theme) from an object’s ability to participate successfully in patterns.
Yeah right. A screw that fits into a hole does have mutual information with the hole. I like the idea that knowledge is about the capacity to harmonize within a particular environment because it might avoid the need to define goal-directedness.
Now we can start to think about measuring the extent to which mutual information contributes to learning of tacit knowledge. Something happens to our object. It gains some mutual information w/ external stuff. If this mutual information increases its ability to pursue some goal predicate, we can say that the information is accessible wrt that goal predicate. We can imagine the goal predicate being “active” in the agent, and having a “translation system” whereby it unpacks the mutual information into what it needs.
The only problem is that now we have to say what a goal predicate is. Do you have a sense of how to do that? I have also come to the conclusion that knowledge has a lot to do with being useful in service of a goal, and that then requires some way to talk about goals and usefulness.
The hope is to eventually be able to build up to complicated types of knowledge (such as the definition you seek here), but starting with really basic forms.
I very much resonate with keeping it as simple as possible, especially when doing this kind of conceptual engineering, which can become so lost. I have been grounding my thinking in wanting to know whether or not a certain entity in the world has an understanding of a certain phenomenon, in order to use that to overcome the deceptive misalignment problem. Do you also have go-to practical problems against which to test these kinds of definitions?
So, I’m trying to interpret your proposal from an epistemic strategy perspective — asking how are you trying to produce knowledge.
It sounds to me like you’re proposing to start with very general formalization with simple mathematical objects (like objectivity being a sort of function, and participating in a goal increasing the measure on the states satisfying the predicate). Then, when you reach situations where the definitions are not constraining enough, like what Alex describes, you add further constraints on these objects?
I have trouble understanding how different it is from the “standard way” Alex is using of proposing a simple definition, finding where it breaks, and then trying to refine it and break it again. Rince and repeat. Could you help me with what you feel are the main differences?
Recently I have been thinking that we should in fact use “really basic” definitions, EG “knowledge is just mutual information”, and also other things with a general theme of “don’t make agency so complicated”. The hope is to eventually be able to build up to complicated types of knowledge (such as the definition you seek here), but starting with really basic forms. Let me see if I can explain.
First, an ontology is just an agents way of organizing information about the world. These can take lots of forms and I’m not going to constrain it to any particular formalization (but doing so could be part of the research program I’m suggesting).
Second, a third-person perspective is a “view from nowhere” which has the capacity to be rooted at specific locations, recovering first-person perspectives. In other words, I relate subjective and objective in the following way: objectivity is just a mapping from specific “locations” (within the objective perspective) to subjective views “from that location”.
Note that an objective view is not supposed to be necessarily correct; it is just a hypothesis about what the universe looks like, described from the 3rd person perspective.
Notice what I’m doing: I’m defining a 3rd person perspective as a solution to the mind-body problem. Why?
Well, what’s a 3rd-person perspective good for? Why do we invent such things in the first place?
It’s good for communication. I speak of the world in objective terms largely because this is one of the best ways to communicate with others. Rather than having a different word for the front of a car, the side of a car, etc (all the ways I can experience a car), I have “car”, so that I can refer to a car in an experience-agnostic way. Other people understand this language and can translate it to their own experience appropriately.
Similarly, if I say something is “to my left” rather than “left”, other people know how to translate that to their own personal coordinate system.
So far so good.
Now, a reasonable project would be to create as useful a 3rd person perspective as possible. One thing this means is that it should help translate between as many perspectives as possible.
I don’t claim to have a systematic grasp of what that implies, but one obvious thing people do is qualify statements: eg, “I believe X” rather than just stating “X” outright. “I want X” rather than “X should happen”. This communicates information that a broad variety of listeners can accept.
Now, a controversial step. A notion of objectivity needs to decide what counts as a “conscious experiencer” or “potential viewpoint”. That’s because the whole point of a notion of objectivity is to be an ontology which can be mapped into a set of 1st-person viewpoints.
So I propose that we make this as broad as possible. In particular, we should be able to consider the viewpoint of any physical object. (At least.)
This is little baby panpsychism. I’m not claiming that “all physical objects have conscious experiences” in any meaningful sense, but I do want my notion of conscious experience to extend to all physical objects, just because that’s a pretty big boundary I can draw, so that I’m sure I’m not excluding anyone actually important with my definition.
For an object to “experience” an event is for it to, like, “feel some shockwaves” from the event—ie, for there to be mutual information there. On the other hand, for an object to “directly experience” an event could be defined as being contained within the physical space of the event, or perhaps to intersect that physical space, or something along those lines.
For an object to “know about something” in this broad sense is just for there to be mutual information.
For me to think there is knowledge is for my objective model to say that there is mutual information.
These definitions obviously have some problems.
Let’s look at a different type of knowledge, which I will call tacit knowledge—stuff like being able to ride a bike (aka “know-how”). I think this can be defined (following my “very basic” theme) from an object’s ability to participate successfully in patterns. A screw “knows how” to fit in threaded holes of the correct size. It “knows how” to go further in when rotated in one way, and come further out when rotated the other way. Etc.
Now, an object has some kind of learning if it can increase its tacit knowledge (in some sense) through experience. Perhaps we could say something like, it learns for a specified goal predicate if it has a tendency to increase the measure of situations in which it satisfies this goal predicate, through experience? (Mathematically this is a bit vague, sorry.)
Now we can start to think about measuring the extent to which mutual information contributes to learning of tacit knowledge. Something happens to our object. It gains some mutual information w/ external stuff. If this mutual information increases its ability to pursue some goal predicate, we can say that the information is accessible wrt that goal predicate. We can imagine the goal predicate being “active” in the agent, and having a “translation system” whereby it unpacks the mutual information into what it needs.
On the other hand, if I undergo an experience while I’m sleeping, and the mutual information I have with that event is just some small rearrangements of cellular structure which I never notice, then the mutual information is not accessible to any significant goal predicates which my learning tracks.
I don’t think this solves all the problems you want to solve, but it seems to me like a fruitful way of trying to come up with definitions—start with really basic forms of “knowledge” and related things, and try to stack them up to get to the more complex notions.
Yep I’m with you here
Yeah I very much agree with justifying the use of 3rd person perspectives on practical grounds.
Well if we are choosing to work with third-person perspectives then maybe we don’t need first person perspectives at all. We can describe gravity and entropy without any first person perspectives at all, for example.
I’m not against first person perspectives, but if we’re working with third person perspectives then we might start by sticking to third person perspectives exclusively.
Yeah right. A screw that fits into a hole does have mutual information with the hole. I like the idea that knowledge is about the capacity to harmonize within a particular environment because it might avoid the need to define goal-directedness.
The only problem is that now we have to say what a goal predicate is. Do you have a sense of how to do that? I have also come to the conclusion that knowledge has a lot to do with being useful in service of a goal, and that then requires some way to talk about goals and usefulness.
I very much resonate with keeping it as simple as possible, especially when doing this kind of conceptual engineering, which can become so lost. I have been grounding my thinking in wanting to know whether or not a certain entity in the world has an understanding of a certain phenomenon, in order to use that to overcome the deceptive misalignment problem. Do you also have go-to practical problems against which to test these kinds of definitions?
So, I’m trying to interpret your proposal from an epistemic strategy perspective — asking how are you trying to produce knowledge.
It sounds to me like you’re proposing to start with very general formalization with simple mathematical objects (like objectivity being a sort of function, and participating in a goal increasing the measure on the states satisfying the predicate). Then, when you reach situations where the definitions are not constraining enough, like what Alex describes, you add further constraints on these objects?
I have trouble understanding how different it is from the “standard way” Alex is using of proposing a simple definition, finding where it breaks, and then trying to refine it and break it again. Rince and repeat. Could you help me with what you feel are the main differences?